tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20772324059024098522017-09-24T01:02:29.176-06:00Favorite Books and Book ReviewAbout books and reading Rebecca Stuhrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16995942373049536577noreply@blogger.comBlogger321125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2077232405902409852.post-79121344076107172182017-09-16T20:05:00.002-06:002017-09-16T20:05:43.450-06:00Since We Fell by Dennis Lehane<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <style><!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1107305727 0 0 415 0;} @font-face {font-family:Calibri; panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1073786111 1 0 415 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; line-height:150%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.0in 1.0in 1.0in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style> <br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">Thank you to Walter Giersbach for sharing this review with me! You can also find it on Goodreads. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Take This Writer Very Seriously</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">It’s presumptuous to think my review of “Since We Fell” will add anything to Mr. Lehane’s stature.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>But I’m compelled to say that the first two-thirds of the novel gave me insights into agoraphobia, acute anxiety and fear of the world around us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>I could say, “Yes, I know what your character feels because I’ve been there,” and isn’t that why writers write?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>To communicate as well as entertain.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">It doesn’t help that our current times add to everyone’s dis-ease and anxiety.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>I come by my neuroses (not yet debilitating like Lehane’s chief character, Rachel) with valid credentials: Recognition of my mortality at age 77 and grief over losing a wife of 46 years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>This story delves deeply into character that seems very familiar.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">Writers of crime fiction often aspire to be taken seriously.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Chandler felt this.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Philip Dick wanted to be taken “seriously.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>I believe Lehane now can legitimately join the ranks of major authors interpreting our trying times.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Not the crimes, but just the difficulties of coping with one day after another and fear that the wolf is overtaking you.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">Take this passage as Brian’s partner Caleb says, “When we were young, at a crucial time in the development of our selves, Brian and I were great friends.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Now he’s where he is and I’m where I am…and I’m not sure who we are anymore.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>When you spend so much time in the skins of others that you don’t recognize the smell of your own anymore, maybe the only allegiance you owe is to the people who remembered you before the makeup and the stagecraft took over.”</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">Then — surprise! — the last third of “Since We Fell” races ahead with “reveals” that Rachel was not irrational in suspecting her husband of lying and infidelity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>There’s a magnificent $75 million scam taking place under her nose.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>People die violently.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Rachel and her husband are on the run as the very bad guys close in. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">This is also an urban-centric novel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Many of Lehane’s novels center on the Boston area.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>He’s a Boston boy the way Raymond Chandler was a Californian, Faulkner a Mississippian.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>I feel a kindred spirit for Boston because of that year I lived in Cambridge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Boston is, like New York and a few other cities, a personality in its own right.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Robert S. Parker knew that when his heir apparent Ace Atkins set <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lullaby</i> in that city and included a street map in the frontispiece.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">This is the 10th Dennis Lehane novel I’ve read and it’s by far the best of the best.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">posted to Goodreads 6/30/17</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">Thank you Walter! I have some catching up to do! </div></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Favorite Books and Book Review</div>Rebecca Stuhrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16995942373049536577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2077232405902409852.post-72229625147614931512017-09-16T19:51:00.000-06:002017-09-16T19:51:01.122-06:00The Violins of Saint-Jacques<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Patrick Leigh Fermor. <i>The Violins of Saint-Jacques</i>. Introducton by James Campbell. NY: New York Review of Books.<br /><br />This novella can be read in one relaxed reading-filled day, but it is packed with good solid words, both English and French. Fermor uses at least a handful of words that I haven't come across before, such as "orgulous" and "unarmigerous." Each sentence is made up of wonderful consonants, hard and soft, that find their way into the small vacant spaces in one's brain. I wanted to write down and record every sentence as I was reading. Here is an example -- you should read it out loud to get a feel for these words.<br /><br />"The orgulous record of their gestures - the carnage they had wrought among the Caribs and the English, their Christian virtues, the multitude of their progeny, their valour in attack and their impavid patience in adversity, the suavity of their manners, the splendour of their munificence and their pious ends - was incised with a swirling seventeenth-century duplication of long S's and a cumulative nexus of dog-Latin superlatives that hissed from the shattered slabs like a basketful of snakes" (p. 20). (so many v's!)<br /><br />Fermor, is a travel writer, and he does excel at description. In this novella, the narrator is a traveler who has landed on a small Greek Island after traveling in the Caribbean. The novella opens with a brief history and description of the island, Saint-Jacques, located on the "sixty-first meridian," a "few leauges windward from the channel that flows between Guadeloupe and Dominica and well to the south-east of Marie Galante, where it hung like a bead...." It's disappearance from the maps is "no mystery," but the reader doesn't learn of its fate until near the end of the novella.<br /><br />The narrator tells its story as he hears it from an aging artist who, in the 1890s made her way from France to St. Jacques to serve as a governess to distant relatives. The story is one of opulence, class and racial division, colonial privilege and eccentricity -- as though the inhabitants of St. Jacques were rare species that had evolved in isolation from others of their kind. What seemed distasteful&nbsp; to me in the everyday practices of St. Jacques is related by the narrator without flinching or signs of distaste. Fermor published the novel in the 50s, so I don't know whether this acceptance of privilege and racial division is truly unremarkable to the author, or if the tone of the novel is ironic. I think it could interpreted that way. <br /><br />The main event of the story told within the story of the novella is a Shrove Tuesday ball hosted by the Serindans, the great family of the island. Fermor minutely describes the Serindans' preparations, the food, the costumes and elegant dress, the activity of the family and the guests, and the heightened emotions of the day.<br /><br />To learn about the fate of St. Jacques and its inhabitants, you'll need to read this novella for yourself. Set aside a little time and take it in all at once if possible -- or several bus rides if an empty day doesn't present itself to you. It is truly enjoyable to take in Fermor's writing and the story's climax is a surprise.<br /><br />Put your feet up and slip off to an imaginary island and settle into a few beautiful hours of reading. </div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Favorite Books and Book Review</div>Rebecca Stuhrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16995942373049536577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2077232405902409852.post-86085574753421096672016-07-17T19:31:00.002-06:002016-07-17T22:12:03.681-06:00Speaking with the Spirits --Rochester Knockings by Hubert Haddad<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Hubert Haddad. <i>Rochester Knockings: A Novel of the Fox Sisters</i>. Translated from the French by Jennifer Grotz. Rochester: Open Letter Books, 2015. Published in France as <i>Théorie de la villain petite</i> <i>fille</i> by Zulma. <br /><br /><br />With <i>Rochester Knockings, </i>Haddad gives us an interesting look at the United States of the second half of the 19th Century. Haddad imagines the story of the historical Fox sisters, Leah, Kate, and Maggie, who through their communications with the spirits of the dead ignite the cross-continental Spiritualist movement. Haddad paints a United States still, as he describes it, under the influence of Puritanism, with a population naive enough and traumatized by the frequent death of children, spouses, and the great losses suffered in the Civil War to sustain a movement ascribed to by ardent believers and determined charlatans alike. <br /><br />In <i>Rochester Knockings</i>, two young sisters have just moved with their parents to a small town, Hydesville, in New York State. The youngest, Kate, has recently witnessed the death of her much beloved younger brother. Sister Margaret is old enough to feel the loss of dear friends in the move to a new town. Both sisters are lonely; not yet accepted into the social circles of the community’s school and church. Kate dreams of her brother and feels a child’s responsibility for her brother’s death. She is a sleepwalker and seems especially in tune to her natural surroundings and alert to every noise within the house. Both sisters think of the house as a kind of living entity that will accept its occupants or not as it comes to know them. Left alone one night while her sister and parents attend to the birth of a calf, Kate hears strange knockings. When Margaret returns, Kate has her listen for the knocks and over time, both sisters make their mother aware of the strange occurrences. Soon the whole town knows about the knockings at the Hydesville house. The church’s strict pastor, lost within his own guilt at the loss of a young wife, excommunicates the family, who are then in jeopardy from the mob-like reaction of the townspeople. The girls are whisked off to safety with an older sister, Leah, in Rochester. Leah has plans for her sisters’ penchant for communicating with the afterlife. She drives them into a life of public demonstrations and seances. Leah shares in the role of medium to the spirit-world herself. Haddad’s Kate is the true medium of the three sisters. The two older sisters become adept at creating the proper atmosphere and simulating their conversations with the dead. Kate lives in a foggy world with no barrier between the worlds of the living and the dead. Both Kate and Margaret are exhausted by Leah’s ambitions and only Leah, through marriages and prudent management of her (and the younger sisters') earnings, sustains her spiritualist activities and comfortable lifestyle. <br /><br />Celebrities are dependent on the waxing and waning whims of the public, and as the competition grows from imitators eager to cash in on the spiritualist opportunities, the girls’ hold on their public fades. As wooers and supporters die or drift in different directions, Kate and Margaret are left alone and die in poverty. This novel is as much about the rise and fall of the Fox sisters as it is about an American population of immigrants and religious zealots eager and ready to believe not only the sisters who might or might not have been sincere in their exhibitions, but the many fakes who follow in their footsteps. <br /><br />The narrative has a wandering style, characters appear, disappear, and reappear later only to disappear again. The sisters' stories follow sometimes separate, sometimes intertwining threads. I sometimes wondered if the translator got a bit lost in the translations —some of the sentences seemed unnecessarily long and convoluted, and the style a bit inelegant in places. <br /><br />A word about <a href="http://www.openletterbooks.org/" target="_blank">Open Letter Books</a>. This is the nonprofit imprint from the University of Rochester, with the mission of publishing English translations of exemplary literature from throughout the world. Look to Open Letter’s publications to discover writers new to the English speaking reading population.&nbsp; We should hope that Open Letter will thrive. Their beautifully produced books each celebrate the collaboration between writers and readers, the work of the writer to provide creative insight into the human experience and the work of the reader to absorb, understand, and make the writer’s expression meaningful.&nbsp; </div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Favorite Books and Book Review</div>Rebecca Stuhrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16995942373049536577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2077232405902409852.post-60417437798361791832016-07-02T18:21:00.000-06:002016-07-02T18:21:27.301-06:00 The Man Who Loved Birds and his Dog<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">The Man Who Loved Birds by Fenton Johnson. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016.<br /><br />A South Asian doctor moves into a small rural town--her office a former gas station; a priest, former draft dodger, now full of doubts lives in a fading monestary; a communal minded veteran, with plenty of love to share, makes a moderate living off of his marijuana farming; an ambitious, take-no- prisoners county attorney seeks his white whale; a vindictive policeman takes out his disappointment in life by beating his wife and son, his boy loves and seeks out stories, his wife, the boy's mother, loves and tries to protect her son, J.C., the dog roams the countryside freely along with his beloved master.&nbsp;<br /><br />The spiritual nature of this novel is clear from the title of its Part One,<i>"The Earthly Paradise." </i>Its opening epigraph a quote from Luke, "this scripture must be fulfilled in me: And he was counted among the lawless." The epigraph that opens Part Two is from the Bhagavand Gita, "Men will seek beauty, whether in life or in death." The novel revolves around Johnny Faye, the veteran turned marijuana farmer. He is a gentle man with a charismatic warmth that draws people to not only trust him but to love him. The vulnerable Dr. Chatterjee, a refugee of sorts, self-exiled in this isolated town unused to foreigners, first meets Johnny Faye as a patient. Later, she encounters him in a statue garden where she regularly goes for peace and solitude. He arrives just as she becomes aware of a pit of snakes just below where her feet are dangling. He, St. Francis like, "took his walking stick and thurst it gently into the coiling mass. 'Greetings, brother snakes. . . ."<br /><br />Although the St. Francis allusion seems powerful (and his dog's name, J.C. certainly invokes Christian sensibilities), Johnson, describes Faye's snake entwined walking stick as a caduceus, throwing the illusion much further back into spiritual and literary history. Flavian, the troubled priest, meets Johnny Faye during his first foray into a bar--a den of inquity. It is here that Flavian finds himself amidst a pit of metaphorical snakes. Faye protects Flavian from the snakes .He guides Flavian through a game of pool, while, from Flavian's perpsective, he remains a disembodied voice and a faceless body. Faye's caduceus, this time, is not a snake entwined walking stick, but a pool cue. Both Flavian and Dr. Chaterjee are seduced by Johnny Faye's gentle spirit and connection with nature; his ability to provide both physical and spiritual healing. Faye also has a bit of Robin Hood in him, literally stealing from the rich and anonymously delivering up what he has stolen to the poor. <br /><br />All of this calm and beauty is at odds with the county attorney's war on drugs, his greedy ambition, and his willingness to rely on violence, police bruality, and vigilante justice. Economic disparity is also evident in this small town. The small farmers are no longer able to make a living legitimately and so have formed a marijuana growing cooperative, led by Johnny Faye. Economic downturn threatens the traditional ways of the Abbey, Flavian's home. Soon, the abbey's last vestige of self-sufficiency and connection with nature, their heard of cattle, will be sold off and butchered. The county attorney seeks, in his own way, to seduce, through money, promises, and threats. His aim is to destroy Johnny Faye and he easily persuades Officer Smith to help him. While the contrast of Johnny Faye's personally created microcosm of love and gentleness contrasts starkly with the great evils of the world, the plot progresses with both subtlety and sensitivity. The catharses are present but private.&nbsp; <br /><br />Johnson's plot whirls around the yearnings and doubts of both Brother Flavian and Dr. Chatterjee. They are connected through their mutual love for Johnny Faye.&nbsp; They are also connected by their inability to protect the vulnerable. Dr. Chatterjee has saved the life of Officer Smith's son who he has beaten to the brink of death. Mrs. Smith brings her son to Dr. Chatterjee's office while Brother Flavian is visiting.&nbsp; It quickly becomes clear to both Chatterjee and Flavian , that Smith's son has not tumbled into an accident but has been repeatedly abused. It is unclear how to protect the boy in this small town where action on their part could put both mother and son in danger and cost Dr. Chatterjee her job.<br /><br />All of the characters make their choices for better and mostly worse. As Dr. Chatterjee makes her most significant choice, she is reminded by Flavian, that,&nbsp; "this is America. You have choices," although her choice is coerced by threats. Still, she has reason to believe, that compromised as it her choice was, "She had chosen well." Hope survives despair. <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Favorite Books and Book Review</div>Rebecca Stuhrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16995942373049536577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2077232405902409852.post-6333614207704201822016-06-28T16:33:00.000-06:002016-06-28T16:33:56.250-06:00Darryl Pinckney's Black Deutschland <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><i>Black Deutschland</i> by Darryl Pinckney. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016<br /><br />Jed is black and gay and a disappointment to his achievement oriented parents. Their disappointment is either the cause of or the consequence of Jed’s ongoing struggle with addiction. A lover of words and books, Jed follows in the footsteps of Isherwood and Auden to seek a home, both literary and spiritual, in West Berlin. West Berlin is also home to his cousin Cello, an accomplished pianist, neurotic and unstable, and married into a wealthy German family. Jed receives temporary shelter with a reluctant Cello and her family as he works with the media hungry and controversial architect Rosen-Montag. Jed’s story moves backwards and forwards as Pinckney takes the reader back and forth between Jed’s history and his present. Jed’s aspirations in Berlin include liberating himself from his addictions, finding romance, and establishing himself as a writer, all of which he accomplishes to some degree. His books are his one constant as he moves back and forth across the Atlantic, in and out of Cello’s house, unexpectedly finds love and as unexpectedly loses it, and finds himself in and out of work. Jed’s differences with his Chicago family keep him from finding a home with them, but he never realizes the safe harbor, the embracing sense of belonging, he had hoped to find in Berlin. Jed never fully shakes the weight of his American past and eventually tires from his efforts to do so.&nbsp; Pinckney vividly describes the Soviet-era West Berlin with its expatriates, remaining threads to its Nazi past, dark welcoming bars, and its dangerous criminal culture. The city’s cold winters and sombre tones reflect and reinforce Jed’s mindset and diminishing sense of self worth. <i>Black Deutschland</i> is ultimately a tragic novel. For Jed, the novel ends where it began. There is no homecoming in sight for him, no return to family, no private life of warm and accepting embraces.&nbsp; For better or worse, he remains an American abroad in a dark and cheerless post-wall Berlin. </div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Favorite Books and Book Review</div>Rebecca Stuhrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16995942373049536577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2077232405902409852.post-35997010471270874232016-06-26T15:39:00.001-06:002016-06-26T15:39:38.315-06:00Not “But for the Grace of God,” But Because of It<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <style><!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1107305727 0 0 415 0;} @font-face {font-family:Calibri; panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1073786111 1 0 415 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; line-height:150%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.0in 1.0in 1.0in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style> <br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: left;"> <style><!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1107305727 0 0 415 0;} @font-face {font-family:Calibri; panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1073786111 1 0 415 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; line-height:150%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.0in 1.0in 1.0in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;}</style><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In the Shadow of the White Pagoda by Clara Hausske</span></i></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: left;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Review by Walter Giersbach</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: left;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></i></b></div>Historical memoirs are fraught with problems as reminiscences dim or are subjected to revisionism.&nbsp; More problematic is that the farther back in time the commentator goes, the more the facts are distorted by the writer’s interpretation.&nbsp; Because Clara Hausske recalled and kept notes on her work in China almost a century ago, the reader of <i>In the Shadow of the White Pagoda</i> is struck with unvarnished truth about the shattering poverty, malnutrition, sickness, chaos of war and banditry taking place far from the cities.&nbsp; Yes, the writing is often simplistic and reportorial, but reading Hausske’s description of the challenges she and her husband faced in China in the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s is as clear as looking at an unedited film.&nbsp; There is a level of authenticity as she describes a life that’s hard to imagine — except that other parts of the world are undergoing these same difficulties and opportunities.<br /> <style><!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1107305727 0 0 415 0;} @font-face {font-family:Calibri; panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1073786111 1 0 415 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; line-height:150%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.0in 1.0in 1.0in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style> <span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"></span> <br />The Hausskes went to China sponsored by what is now United Board for World Ministries.&nbsp; Their religious denomination was Congregational, now the United Church of Christ.&nbsp; Their mission was located literally in the shadow of the pagoda where 20 years earlier Boxer rebels massacred Christians.&nbsp; <br /><br />Albert Hausske left the U.S., with his wife Clara and two toddler children, in 1920 to administer the accounting for a hospital in Taiku, Shansi Province.&nbsp; This mission was two days’ inland from Tientsin by boat, railway and rickshaw.&nbsp; The book, extremely well edited by her son, Albert Carol Hausske, was published in 1989 from Clara’s notes, photos and letters.<br /><br />This was the back country that appeared on no one’s tour guide.&nbsp; The Hausskes were missionaries not to convert some indifferent Buddhists, but to cure those on the verge of death, feed those protein-starved people who saw meat in their diet only on holidays, who were illiterate to the point of having to unlearn “folk wisdom” and embrace proven scientific diet, and to care for people so desperate they abandoned their children to the school as the only hope their progeny would live.&nbsp; In that, they were lucky also to have served with&nbsp; Dr. Wiloughby Hemingway, uncle of author Ernest Hemingway, who had arrived there in 1903.<br /><br />Clara offers a positive, forbearing look at daily life with all the quotidian duties, communication obstacles (the Hausskes learned to speak Chinese), and hardship of moving from house to house under trying circumstances.&nbsp; It is also an insider’s look at life as the Communists approached Nanjing in 1927, themselves emigrating to Korea as refugees, their return when Chiang Kai-shek recaptured Nanjing, and fears as the Japanese took over city after city in the years leading up to 1941.&nbsp; That declaration of war forced the Hausske family back to the States (there had been occasional furloughs home since 1920) until they could return in the 1950s.&nbsp; <br /><br />She writes, “In 1940, only seven foreign missionaries supervised the care of about fourteen hundred inpatients, ten thousand outpatients, three hundred and fifteen boarding students in the schools, thirty student nurses, several Chinese doctors, and innumerable people in the countryside.”&nbsp; Her commentary on this is enlightening: “Their lives were simple but very rich.&nbsp; They were fortunate that there was always plenty of work to keep them in good spirits.&nbsp; And it was also as well that they could adjust themselves to difficulties when it was necessary to do so.”&nbsp; Was this a rosy-eyed view?&nbsp; More likely it was the interpretation of a spiritually rich person who had seen much progress. <br /><br />Surprisingly, Clara displays a total lack of irony or disbelief in her descriptions of children being carried to the hospital on a relative’s back, or a tearful father giving his child to the orphanage so the boy might live.<br /><br />If there is one lapse for this reader, it is that Clara did not apply more subjective reporting and personal response to the political changes raging around them. Their work was threatened, as were the lives of the local population.&nbsp; The relief work was halted only when the Japanese sent them out of the country and when the Communists refused to let them resume.&nbsp; <br /><br />Today, there often is a knee-jerk reaction to missionaries, seeing them as evangelicals out to corrupt the purity of native populations.&nbsp; Witness what missionaries did to Native Americans and Hawaiians in the name of “civilization.”&nbsp; Clara makes almost no reference to religious teaching in her memoir; there is continual detail of the Chinese lives they saved, the children and adults they taught to read and write, and the Western lessons in diet, nutrition and childcare they taught to extend and enrich their lives.<br /><br />The book provides another interesting insight into the independence of this woman.&nbsp; Clara was often alone when Albert was traveling to other missions.&nbsp; She regularly traveled by herself or with her children.&nbsp; She was emancipated years before women gained the respect they deserved.&nbsp; In many ways, Clara mirrors the life of my grandmother traveling the U.S. on the Chautauqua lecture circuit during the same period.&nbsp; Yes, there were women who became empowered in that period.<br /><br />I need to disclose that Albert and Clara Hausske were friends of my father, Walter C. Giersbach when he was president of Pacific University, and of my mother.&nbsp; I have a vague memory of their son, Trevor Hausske, graduating Pacific in the mid 1940s when I was six years old..&nbsp; And the Hausskes were generous in their gifts of Chinese art to my parents, including their sale of two antique Chinese chests that are still with my family.<br /><br />A few weeks ago I was inventorying the antiques my parents collected and decided to unravel the&nbsp; mystery of who the Hausskes were, these shadowy people from my childhood.&nbsp; Out of that detective work came the discovery of <i>In the Shadow of the White Pagoda</i>, now available only through a used bookseller.&nbsp; <br /><br /><br /><br />Published by Caves Books, Ltd., Taipei, Taiwan, 1989.<br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Favorite Books and Book Review</div>Rebecca Stuhrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16995942373049536577noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2077232405902409852.post-62259593928596767112016-05-14T19:08:00.000-06:002016-05-14T19:08:07.321-06:00Jim Harrison: The Ancient Minstrel<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><i>The Ancient Minstrel</i>. Grove Press, 2016.<br /><br />Jim Harrison died in March of this year at nearly 80 years of age. <i>The Ancient Minstrel </i>was published on March 1, just a few weeks before his death. Jim Harrison's last published work is the first of his more than 20 works of fiction and 18 volumes of poetry. His Wikipedia article says that he has been compared to Faulkner and Hemingway. If this is the case then <i>Ancient Minstrel</i> does not fit the norm. Certainly these two authors did not come to mind as I read the three novellas that make up this collection. <br /><br /><i>The Ancient Minstrel </i>consists of three novellas, "The Ancient Minstrel," "Eggs," and "The Howling Buddha." In his introduction, Harrison calls them fictionalized memoir. He didn't write straight out memoir because his wife "insisted on being left out," and his two daughters echoed their mother's request. And so we have fictionalized memoir. The first and third novellas feature an aging alcoholic, lecherous man as their central character (two different men), and these two stories book end a very different novella which has a young single woman as its main character.<br /><br />"The Ancient Minstrel" is the fictionalized memoir. It features an aging writer concerned with drink a flagging libido, and his farm in Montana. He is looking back over his life, which has been made easy by his lucrative film script writing. Despite the slow decay that comes with aging and excessive drinking, the hero enjoys his life on his farm, his friends, and his writing. He and his wife are separated, but see each other regularly and have a tolerant and amiable relationship--an important element in the story. The tension in the novella revolves around the writers purchase of a pregnant sow, his growing relationship with Darling and her litter of piglets and all things pig oriented. Harrison writes of this emotional fixation with colorful and humorous detail. <br /><br />"Eggs" tells the story of Catherine, a girl who grows up with her brother in a household filled with matrimonial rancor. A family situation which is damaging for both brother and sister. Her brother runs away at an early age and stays away from the family, but Catherine finds relief and a certain amount of peace sitting with the chickens on her paternal grandparents' farm. The farm serves as a retreat for both Catherine and her mother. Her maternal grandparents are in England. Catherine and her mother move there before the second world war breaks out. Eventually Catherine's mother returns to Montana, but Catherine stays with her British grandparents, living through the blitz in all of its horror. Eventually Catherine returns to Montana to live on her grandparents farm, where she raises chickens and lives a carefully constructed, moderate, and intentional life. She becomes intent on having a child, and goes about planning her pregnancy with the same careful thoughtfulness and intention.<br /><br />Finally, "The Howling Buddha," features Detective Sunderson, a long time Harrison character, whose level of alcoholism and lecherousness make the weakness of the hero of "The Ancient Minstrel" seem mild by comparison. Detective Sunderson likes all women, and, most fatally, he is attracted to underaged girls. While nominally about retrieving the daughter of a friend from a cult, the story is really about Detective Sunderson's last mistake and final act.<br /><br />Where as the first two novellas have a certain sweetness to them, "The Howling Buddha" is dark and uncompromising in its conclusion.<br /><br /><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Favorite Books and Book Review</div>Rebecca Stuhrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16995942373049536577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2077232405902409852.post-26310262244222592792016-05-11T19:22:00.003-06:002016-05-11T19:22:57.980-06:00Stella Gibbons: Pure Juliet<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Stella Gibbons. <i>Pure Juliet</i>. Vintage, 2016. Taking my usual look through our Penn Libraries new book shelf, the name Stella Gibbons caught my eye. I associate Stella Gibbons with my childhood viewing of <i>Cold Comfort Farm</i> and the wonderful Alistair Sims. and my later reading of the novel, which I enjoyed even more than the 1971 (original broadcast date according to the <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/archive/7/7.html" target="_blank">Master Piece Theater Archive</a>). Gibbons's <i>Cold Comfort</i> heroine, Flora Poste, is independent, optimistic, and pleasant but never deterred. She does get married in the end, or at least fly off with someone you think she might marry, but still, I think Flora is an early role model for independent women.<br /><br />You might say there is some cultural hegemony in her approach to the farm residents, a bit too much of an imperialist mind set, or you might think of Flora as representing the still fairly new 20th Century and its slow but inevitable incursion on the remnants of the old century. You can think of none of that and simply enjoy Gibbons' wonderful style and humor. It is a book that sits well in the pantheon of British humorous novels. I'm not an expert, but I think of Wodehouse, and, another childhood favorite (thanks to my mother's love of books and reading), Jerome K. Jerome's T<i>hree Men in a Boat</i>. These are all writers that I keep by my bed for late night rereading.<br /><br />But, I digress! This is about <i>Pure Juliet. </i>As I was saying, the name Stella Gibbon caught my eye.&nbsp; I picked up the book to investigate, and read that the manuscript "was brought to light by her family in 2014" and the 2016 Vintage edition is its first publication. A new Stella Gibbon novel! Gibbon was a fairly prolific writer, something, I am sad to say, I wasn't aware of until reading the inside cover of this volume. <i>Pure Juliet</i>&nbsp; would appear as the 17th in a list of Gibbons novels. There is no date given as to when this manuscript was written, and the novel itself does not include references to any dates, but I'm guessing it is set sometime in the 1970s (Gibbon died in 1989). The character Juliet is another independent young women. She is determined and too intent on her single focus to be deterred. But she is very different from Flora Poste. Juliet lives in a world of mathematics and is in pursuit of the essence of coincidence. Today we might say that Juliet has Asperger's Syndrome, but Gibbons portrays her character without any mention of syndromes. She does not fit in and cares little for social niceties or making conversation. <br /><br /><i>Pure Juliet </i>is a book of coincidences. Juliet happens to meet a rich old woman in the park who offers Juliet a place to stay after she leaves the comprehensive because Juliet's father won't allow her to go to University.&nbsp; Juliet is intent on following her coincidences, and slips out of the house to go live with the old woman. An only child, Juliet knows enough to make a good case for herself and tells the old woman that she has no father and four siblings. While Juliet is not kind or loving to the old woman, she gives her enough attention to maintain her place. The old woman's nephew happens to be a kind man who takes an interest in Juliet's peculiar nature. Unlike most people he is interested in nurturing her genius and, unlike most people, accepts Juliet's lack of interest in men and romance. When the old woman dies, he makes sure that Juliet has a place to live and work. As the story takes its course, there are a few more coincidences, enough to lead Juliet to winning an important honor from an oil rich, math loving nation with a young open minded ruler. The ruler convinces the scholars at the ancient university to overlook the detail of Juliet's sex and to recognize her great work.<br /><br />So, I've given a bit too much away, but this book is a pleasure to read. The writing style is understated and engaging. You see the coincidences as an after thought--Gibbons doesn't bludgeon the reader over the head with them. Her portrayal of Juliet is straight forward but tender. Juliet's nature is a gift and a curse. Gibbons' narrative suggests that it might take having what looks like Asperger's Syndrome for a woman to achieve a work of genius. In the world of this novel,&nbsp; a woman is confronted with pressure to have boyfriends and children, to meet parents' expectations or to take on certain kinds of jobs.&nbsp; Even in the world outside this novel, women don't tend to marry adoring men who make sure that all of their needs are attended to, but we know plenty of examples of men having just such a partner. Juliet, though, finds a benefactor who makes sure she remembers to eat.<br /><br />In <i>Pure Juliet</i>, Gibbons also looks at difference. Juliet is an extreme example, but Frank, the rich old woman's nephew, is avidly opposed to unnecessary consumption, maintains a spartanly decorated house, is a dedicated vegetarian, and other than Juliet (and is large family), his interest, fortune&nbsp; and time go toward promoting edible grasses. There are other quirky characters, characters who are less than satisfied, characters who are set on one thing or another, if not to the level of Juliet's single mindedness. She is the example at the top of graph and the others create the downward slope. <br /><br />I thoroughly enjoyed this thoughtful and kind book. I am pleased to have the words of Stella Gibbons floating in my head, and to contemplate her nonjudgmental, unlabled look at the peculiarities, but also tendernesses inherent in human nature.<br /><br />Let us hope her optimism and belief in kindness manifests itself in our 21st century and decade as well. We need a lot of kindness. <br /><br />Read on. </div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Favorite Books and Book Review</div>Rebecca Stuhrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16995942373049536577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2077232405902409852.post-71002589131133332322016-01-12T22:14:00.002-06:002016-01-12T22:14:28.739-06:00Career Advice for Graduate Students @ Penn Libraries<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2016/01/11/recommended-books-give-career-advice-phds-essay?utm_content=buffer81bc3&amp;utm_medium=social&amp;utm_source=twitter&amp;utm_campaign=IHEbuffe" target="_blank">The Carpe Career</a> blog at Inside Higher Education recommends a handful of books that all Ph.D. candidates should consider reading. I thought I'd take a look to see what we have at Penn so that, should you be interested, you can get right to them.<br /><br /><i>"So What are You Going to Do With That?": Finding Careers Outside Academia&nbsp;</i> by Susan Basalla and Maggie Debelius. University of Chicago Press, 2007. <a href="http://franklin.library.upenn.edu/record.html?id=FRANKLIN_4223701" target="_blank">HF5382.7 .B374 2007</a> <br />If you're wondering if you might find peace and contentment beyond academia, this book is a good place to start. (And be sure to check out the <a href="http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/alt-ac/" target="_blank">Alt-Acadamy Media Commons</a> Project. <br /><br /><i>The Academic Job Search Handbook </i>by Julia Vick and Jennifer Furlong. University of Pennsylvania Press. 2008. We have many copies and multiple editions of this book across the libraries. Seems like the editors at the Penn Press knew what they were doing when they published this book. Find the print here: <a href="http://franklin.library.upenn.edu/record.html?id=FRANKLIN_4371517" target="_blank">LB2331.72 .H45 2008</a> and the electronic edition <b><a href="http://hdl.library.upenn.edu/1017.12/1273445" target="_blank">here</a></b> (for you folks with a Pennkey that is). The Carpe Career blogger, Natalie Lundsteen, calls the advice in this book "tried and true," and recommends reading it from "cover to cover."<br /><br /><i>The Professor Is In: The Essential Guide for Turning Your Ph.D. Into a Job</i> by Karen Kelsky. Three Rivers Press, 2015. This one is so new, it isn't yet available in the library, but look for it soon. Some of our BorrowDirect partners do have it in, so if you'd like to get a head start, you can investigate that route. Lundsteen recommends pairing this title up with the Penn Press title. It rewards careful and critical reading, but hold on to your hat.<br /><br /><i>Give and Take</i> by Adam Grant. Viking, 2013. <a href="http://franklin.library.upenn.edu/record.html?id=FRANKLIN_6075595" target="_blank">BF637.S8 G6855 2013</a>. Lund rates this title as one of her type five career books, although it is not just for academics. She recommends it especially for international students looking to become more effective networkers.<br /><br /><em>Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking </em>by Susan Cain. Crown Publishers, 2012. <a href="http://franklin.library.upenn.edu/record.html?id=FRANKLIN_5431611" target="_blank">BF698.35.I59 C35 2012</a>. Introverts, gather strength and succeed; extroverts, learn more about some of the people you may be working with. Check out Susan Cain's blog, <a href="http://www.quietrev.com/" target="_blank">Quiet Revolution</a> for more. There is information and ideas there for introverts and extroverts, and those who fall in between.&nbsp; <br /><br /><i>Networking for Nerds </i>by Alaina Levine. Wiley Blackwell, 2015. Perhaps written with the science Ph.D. in mind, Lunsteen gives this out as a prize at the career talks she gives. <a href="http://franklin.library.upenn.edu/record.html?id=FRANKLIN_6768255" target="_blank">H</a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" target="_blank">D69.S8 L475 2015</a><br /><br /><i>Zen and the Art of Making a Living</i> by Laurence Boldt, Penguin, 2009. MIT and Harvard have this title in their collections. Penn will soon, so check back in a week or two. Perhaps something like the famous <i>What Color is Your Parachute </i>(Hey! There is a 2015 edition of this book--still going strong), Boldt seeks to help you find what will bring you the most joy. Lundsteen recommends this for Ph.D.s who like to "ponder and philosophize."<br /><br /><em>How to Negotiate Your First Job</em> by Paul Levy and Farzana Mohamed. Lundsteen keeps several copies of this on her office bookshelf and it can be read in an hour. You may need to investigate your favorite bookstore to get your hands on this one.<br /><br />Do you have a favorite career title that isn't on this list? Leave us a comment.&nbsp; In the meantime, take a look at one of these books. These books are in demand, so be prepared to make use of interlibrary loan our your favorite bookstore. <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Favorite Books and Book Review</div>Rebecca Stuhrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16995942373049536577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2077232405902409852.post-37724941931000314382015-01-14T06:28:00.001-06:002016-05-11T18:23:44.499-06:00Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story; Lee's On Such a Full Sea; Iyer's Wittgenstein Jr: A Comparison<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><b>Gary Shteyngart, Chang Rae Lee, and Lars Iyer </b><br /><br />Shteyngart, Lee, and Iyer are authors of three very different books, but at the same time they share, to a greater or lesser extent, the theme of a society in decay … or society past decay. I’ll set Iyer’s <i>Wittgenstein Jr</i> aside for the time being. Unlike Shteyngart’s <i>Super Sad True Love Story</i> and Lee’s <i>On</i> <i>Such a Full Sea</i>, Iyer’s book takes place in the all too recognizable present. Shteyngart and Lee offer their readers an unsavory taste of the future, but as Shteyngart elucidated when he read at Grinnell College several years ago, the not too distant future. <br /><br />I might not have drawn a connection between Shteyngart’s futuristic story of scanning instead of reading, credit poles, onion skin pants, äppäräts that assess the merits and prospects of potential hook ups, and Chinese and Norwegian dominance over the United States both economically (the currency is the Yuan) and militarily, with Lee’s futuristic story of upper class Charters, carefully controlled facilities and Mad Max infrastructure-free counties coupled with Chinese immigrant mass colonization of America’s abandoned urban neighborhoods, if I hadn’t been reading Shteyngart’s Little Failure at the same time that I was reading <i>On Such a Full Sea</i>. I discovered in the autobiographical misery that is <i>Little Failure</i> that Shteyngart had been a student of Lee’s at Hunter College. Very interesting.&nbsp; Lee and Shteyngart write in very different styles. If you’ve read Lee’s <i>The Surrendered</i> you’ll know how unrelentingly bleak a Lee novel can be or at least how bleak they have become. Shteyngart’s view of human history and human destiny may not be any less bleak than Lee’s, but he can swaddle his tragic outlook in flawless and sometimes (painfully) hilarious satire (and no, whoever told you your first novel was your best novel, was wrong. <i>Super Sad</i> is one of the great American novels.)&nbsp;Two different novels share a similar vision. It is not unlike reading a contemporary novel with Homer’s Odyssey clearly in your memory. As the plot unfolds, it dawns on you that it was all pretty well laid out some 3,000 years ago. But Homer’s epic tale is a beautiful bundle of words worth living with, repeating, refining, ornamenting, and thoroughly examining. (Re: Iyer’s novel: it may be more of a riff on Socrates than it is Homer).&nbsp; <br />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <br />Lee’s Fan takes such an Odyssean journey. She leaves her carefully cocooned “facility” (B-mor, neocolonial Baltimore) to search for a boyfriend who has disappeared through mysterious but official channels and a cousin who won a place in the well-heeled, well-protected, well-walled consumer haven of the Charters. She slips through a gate, picked up on the local vid, but otherwise lost enough to become a local legend and to inspire a brief period of unrest and rebellion. Fan has to make her way through the dangerous Counties, a sort of infrastructureless, lawless, and governmentless territory outside the enclosed facilities and Charters.&nbsp; Like Odysseus, Fan has native wit and resiliency, but she is also kind and caring. She is determined, but she has a naïve unsuspecting saintliness about her as well. It is this saintliness that saves her; her kindness repaid with kindness when she needs it most.&nbsp; Lee’s not too distant future has a well-established wealth disparity, a corporate like organization of society, with those in the facilities well cared for but also mesmerized into maintaining a just sustainable status quo. They comply with their carefully defined niche in society, producing the food and other goods for those in the Charters. In return, they have safety, shelter, and family. Because the climate has become unpredictable and hostile, and the environment has become dangerously depleted and poisoned, the growing conditions are artificial. Fan is a diver in an aquaculture tank—keeping the tank clean and nurturing the fish. Others grow vegetables. Everything is monitored and tested to limit the Charter community members’ exposure to C causing agents. Almost everyone is infected with C, but health care is rationed with none available in the Counties and only carefully allotted care available in the facilities. Charters have the best access and care. Similar scenarios exist for education and opportunities. But Charter life is about spending; Facility life is about family and routine and peace; County life is about wits and survival. <br /><br />Shteyngart’s New Yorkers are also consumers. Credit is your most important asset. Credit poles are everywhere reading your credit score as you walk by. Students no longer read, but rather scan texts. Shteyngart’s hero is a book owner and a book reader, one of the many ways he is set apart from the rest of his social circle. He is hapless and hopelessly in love. We read his romance as it plays out via texts and emails. He works for a cryogenic lab, where people are frozen in pursuit of agelessness and eternal life. The Norwegians and the Chinese are always threats in the background, until the end of the novel when they are no longer in the background… but have taken control. Shteyngart’s New York is one of social disparity, mindless consumerism, shallow intellect and lack of curiosity. In Shteyngart’s novel, his protagonist, Lenny, is said to be, by his Chinese critics, “ a tribute to literature as it once was…” (327). Following the fall of New York, Lenny makes his way to “Stability-Canada,” finally ending his days in the “Tuscan Free State,” where there is “less data, less youth, and where old people … were not despised simply for being old…” (328). Despite this somewhat bucolic ending, the world is collapsing all around, the human race, according to the Italians, mere horse flies to the roiling climate’s fly-swatter. <br /><br />A quick jump to Iyer’s <i>Wittgenstein, Jr</i>. Iyer has an oddly repetitive writing style that you either sink into comfortably or become very annoyed with (or both!). In addition, he makes heavy use of italics so that in your head, you continually lean on words. Iyer becomes a voice in your head. If you’ve read his<i> Spurious</i>, <i>Dogma</i>, and <i>Exodus</i> trilogy, with twin heroes as "Madmen" of philosophy, you’ll be familiar with it. I admit that I read right through <i>Spurious</i> and <i>Dogma</i>, but stumbled part way through <i>Exodus</i>, never quite finishing it. The theme of a humanities phobic academy is continued in <i>Wittgenstein, Jr.</i> The interesting difference is that the tale is told from the perspective of a student rather than from that of the philosophy professor. The students have decided that their professor reminds them of Wittgenstein, and thus his name. “He dresses like Wittgenstein…and he behaves a bit like Wittgenstein too . . . . And of course, like the real Wittgenstein, he has come to Cambridge to do f<i>undamental work in philosophical logic</i>.” The professor leads the class in a Socratic fashion, asking questions but never explaining. The class dwindles down to a loyal few who are interested to varying levels. The remnant make up a a microcosm of student stereotypes. The students <i>party</i> heavily, <i>indulging</i> in alcohol and drugs as they <i>re-enact</i> ancient drama and <i>relive </i>ancient debates. Through the theatrics, the posturing, and the increasing distress and weakening sanity of W., Iyer takes us a little distance into questions of being and nothingness. The students are in pain and confusion, party wildly, play like children (there is a brilliant scene where they form a human orrery), do their homework (I think). The narrator, Peters, is in love with Wittgenstein, but this only unfolds in the final section of the book. Peters stays behind during the winter break to take care of Wittgenstein, who is in a fragile state. Peters as caretaker to Wittgenstein has a different narrative voice from Peters as hilarious hijinxing student. He demonstrates a tenderness and maturity not otherwise revealed in Iyer’s characters. And in a similar way Shteyngart sends his protagonist to a thoughtful but dark retreat in the Tuscan Free State, Iyer’s novel moves from black, chaotic humor to bittersweet reflection. Iyer's novel, like Shteyngart's and Lee's, surprises by being a sad love story. But, while Lee and Shteyngart portray the demise of society and the earth’s ability to sustain human life, Iyer focuses on the life of the mind and the world of the academy. But this life and its world are crumbling as well.&nbsp; <br /><br />All three novels leave us thinking about the future or maybe trying not to think about the future. If anything, the world is even bleaker than when I finished each of these novels. Surely something will turn around? Lenny, visiting friends in a rustic villa, listens to them talk about “global warming and the end of human life on earth . . . . I could not understand how, as parents, my friends could even begin to imagine the extinguishing of their son’s world . . . .” (330). This is a question I continuously ask, especially of our elected officials. Are none of you parents? Have you no desire to see a future for your children? Your grandchildren? Are you kidding me—this is all okay with you? Let no one say that the novel is an unimportant genre or that we’re better off with nonfiction. By shedding a fresh light on our world, by adding another dimension to Homer's truly timeless epic, we become able to recognize aspects of ourselves and our world that might have been ignored, overlooked. We may not like what we see, but we benefit from the revelation. The revelation may leave us confused and uncertain, but as Socrates suggested, knowing how much we don't know (or understand) is to be that much wiser.<br /><br />If you are having trouble finding novels that seem to be worth dedicating the little undistracted time you have, I would recommend that you sit down to give a good read (no scanning) to these three novels. You will laugh and you will cry and you will contemplate and consider. You may also want to take more naps or set out to read (or re-read) all of P.G. Wodehouse as respite and escape. <br /><br />Find these at your local library!<br />Shteyngart, Gary. <i>Little Failure: A Memoir</i>. New York: Random House, 2014.<br />Shteyngart, Gary. <i>Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel</i>. New York: Random House, 2010.<br />Lee, Chang Rae. <i>On Such a Full Sea. </i>New York : Riverhead Books, 2014.<br />Iyer, Lars. <i>Wittgenstein Jr.</i> <span class="itemPublisher">Brooklyn, NY : Melville House Publishing, [2014]&nbsp;</span><br /><br /><span class="itemPublisher">By the way: <b><i>Melville House</i></b> is an awesome publisher--go to their Web site, see the cute hamster and check out their catalog of books. There is much to indulge in! <a href="http://www.mhpbooks.com/">www.mhpbooks.com</a></span><br /><span class="itemPublisher"><br /></span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Favorite Books and Book Review</div>Rebecca Stuhrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16995942373049536577noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2077232405902409852.post-22203073817480199202014-08-23T19:44:00.002-06:002014-08-25T05:10:16.484-06:00Holling C. and Lucille Holling: The Book of Indians <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">From Walter Giersbach. You may also want to read<a href="http://philadelphiabookreview.blogspot.com/2008/04/holling-c-holling-childrens-illustrator.html" target="_blank"> Giersbach's essay on Holling and his Paddle to the Sea</a> from April 2008.<br /><br /><b>The Book of Indians:</b><br /><b>Working from Points of Authenticity</b><br /><br />I’ve eagerly anticipated reviewing <i>The Book of Indians</i>.&nbsp; But first I had to buy the book ($12, used, through Amazon).&nbsp; And read it, pushing aside other commitments.&nbsp; And doing some background investigation.<br /><br />It’s necessary to begin by repeating that Holling and his wife Lucille were, among all their other qualities, authentic writers, illustrators, naturalists and historians.&nbsp; After marrying in 1925, they traveled extensively throughout the Southwest.&nbsp; (Holling’s first exposure had been a year-long stay in New Mexico after graduating college in 1923.) <br /><br />Their work reflected their knowledge, as described by Hazel Gibb Hinman in her Master’s thesis in 1958.&nbsp; She reports that in 1929, they stayed at the Nine Quarter Circle guest ranch northwest of Yellowstone Park, helping design the buildings.&nbsp; Traveling that winter up to Alberta, Canada, they took a tepee for camping.&nbsp; (Going to search for tent poles, they came back to find tribeswomen had already set up their tent.)&nbsp; After returning to the ranch to finish their work, they went on to Lubbock, Texas, to paint murals.&nbsp; Then it was out to California, sketching and writing, with their Coleman stove, tent and camping equipment.&nbsp; Never staying overlong in one place, they drove back to Phoenix at rodeo time where they drew and painted, selling their work to finance their travels.&nbsp; (Ms. Hinman notes that in 1934 Holling demonstrated his fire-making skills at a luncheon lecture, starting a fire with two sticks in just seven minutes and so impressing a club member that he asked Holling to design his restaurant.)<br /><br />That was just the winter of 1929, and all the while Holling and Lucille were making notes and sketches for two collaborative landmark books, The Book of Indians, (published in 1935 by Platt &amp; Munk) and The Book of Cowboys (published a year later).<br /><br />The Book of Indians attempts a grand perspective on North American tribes people in 13 chapters:&nbsp; An introduction into the “types of Indians living in different kinds of country,” four chapters about the home life of children and eight chapters relating their adventures.&nbsp; The book is essentially divided geographically among People of the Forests and Lakes, the Plains, the Deserts and Mesas, and the Rivers and the Seas<br /><br />There are six beautiful colored illustrations in the plein-art style of the Southwest, plus many, many &nbsp;sidebar illustrations of children, their homes, tools and weapons, graphic artwork, and animals.&nbsp; The sepia pen-and-ink style drawings make a reader linger and digest each detail of the small pictures in the margins.<br /><br />A critical element of this children’s book is the cultural and historical distinctions made by the Hollings.&nbsp; The Native American nations were as different as the European countries, and this is explained in the first chapter.&nbsp; Most dramatically, the Plains Indians changed radically from planters to hunters when horses were introduced in the 1600s.&nbsp; The horse might well have been the cultural equivalent of the Industrial Revolution in Europe.<br /><br />I believe we can forgive someone writing in the 1930s about misconceptions that today would be viewed as culturally suspect.&nbsp; Columbus did not think he had arrived in India.&nbsp; (The Spanish term might originally have been hijos in Dios—children of God.)&nbsp; And when a tribes person died it’s insensitive to say “He went to the Happy Hunting Ground.”&nbsp; But these lapses are rare in comparison to the facts that abound: how teepees are constructed and how they evolved, tool-making, housing adapted to the environment, and plant life that forms lifestyles.&nbsp; Happily, the Hollings provide a glossary of 31 words any pre-teen child should be familiar with.<br /><br /><i>The Book of Indians</i> is first and foremost educational — and of particular value to home-schooled children.&nbsp; The writing is generally expository, with touches of drama to make the lesson more amiable.&nbsp; The narratives of the children, who are the main characters driving each of the geographical sections, are somewhat two-dimensional.&nbsp; In this, Holling’s narrative ability developed tremendously in the decade until Paddle-to-the-Sea was published.&nbsp; However, the Indian children’s plotting and personalities do grow toward the end when Raven joins the whale hunt and almost drowns (pp. 109-110) and when the slave child Cedar Bough negotiates her freedom by finding a great cache of copper (pp. 115-118).<br /><br />The success of Holling’s writing also lies in its simplicity.&nbsp; As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, Holling's Paddle-to-the-Sea has a Fog Index of 6.9, meaning 91% of everyday words we use are more difficult to read. &nbsp;His Flesch Reading Index score is 75.2, meaning 90% of other vocabulary is harder.&nbsp; (A Flesch score of 90-100 means the writing is understood by an average 11-year-old.)&nbsp; And no one complains because something is too simple.&nbsp; Or because it lacks entertainment.&nbsp; So generations return to Holling Clancy Holling’s remarkable writing — and his wife’s collaborative illustration — year after year.<br /><br />July 7, 2014<br /><br /><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Favorite Books and Book Review</div>Rebecca Stuhrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16995942373049536577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2077232405902409852.post-68872072542095851432014-08-23T19:31:00.001-06:002014-08-25T05:11:35.880-06:00Graham Greene's The Tenth Man<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Walter Giersbach reviews Graham Greene. You can (will be happy to) find more writings by Walter Giersbach at<a href="http://allotropiclucubrations.blogspot.com/" target="_blank"> http://allotropiclucubrations.blogspot.com/</a><br /><br /><b>What Would You Trade for Your Life?</b><br /><br />Graham Greene is a truly amazing writer for having “outlined” a novella — 30,000 words — that lay fallow from 1948 until it was discovered at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios in 1987 and finally published.<br /><br />“The Tenth Man” takes place in wartime France.&nbsp; Thirty men have been imprisoned by the Gestapo, who insist three must die — the prisoners are to choose which.&nbsp; Jean-Louis Charlot, the lawyer, trades his marked ballot in return for giving another prisoner his house and all his belongings.&nbsp; Upon being released, Charlot drifts back to the home he once owned to find young Thérèse and her aged mother (the dead man’s sister and mother) occupying the estate.<br /><br />Never admitting who he is, Charlot receives all the anger the young woman has for the man who bargained away her brother’s life. <br /><br />Without reprising the plot — the criminal who appears claiming he was the rightful owner of the estate and who accuses Charlot of being the charlatan and two other characters who are simply plot devices — this story offers a tight examination of guilt and the search for absolution.&nbsp; Greene presents a deep examination of remorse and redemption within a tightly written plot of accusations, deception and lies.&nbsp; The writing is extremely tight, with no extraneous description that doesn’t move the plot forward.<br /><br />A specific time period frames the story, when the Nazis still occupied France, but it is a universal story of fear and cowardice that leads to spiritual emancipation.<br /><br />You will remember Greene, probably, for his “Our Man in Havana” and “The Quiet American,” both of which were made into movies with, respectively, Alec Guinness and Michael Caine.&nbsp; It was while Greene was working on “The Third Man” under contract with MGM that he remembers dashing off the story line of “The Tenth Man.”&nbsp; Thirty-five years later, MGM (which owned the copyright) had the book published, with Greene’s revisions.&nbsp; Is it too late for MGM or another studio or film maker to put this story on the screen?&nbsp; Like much of Greene’s writing, it is a timely story for our times.<br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Favorite Books and Book Review</div>Rebecca Stuhrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16995942373049536577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2077232405902409852.post-36053553486514869202014-08-23T19:26:00.003-06:002014-08-25T05:14:05.957-06:00MIkhail Epstein: Tranformative Humanities: A Manifesto<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">&nbsp;I am beginning Mikhail Epstein’s <i>Transformative Humanities</i> for the second time. My plan is to write something about each chapter. Looking back to April 2013, you’ll find a post on <a href="http://philadelphiabookreview.blogspot.com/2013/04/mikhail-epstein-transformative.html" target="_blank">Epstein's Chapter 6</a>, entitled "Semiurgy: From Language Analysis to Language Synthesis,"chapter. But I am starting over again with the introduction. You can find Professor Epstein’s smiling and friendly face on the Web. At his Emory University Website you might sum up his areas of expertise, by using the old fashioned term Renaissance individual: “cultural and literary theory; the history of Russian literature (especially Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky and 20th century poetry); contemporary philosophy and religion; Western and Russian postmodernism; new methods and interdisciplinary approaches in the humanities; semiotics; modalities; lexicology and neologisms; ideological discourse; ideas and electronic media.” Many of these interests, especially, Western and Russian postmodernism through to electronic media are evident in the “Introduction” to his work. Professor Epstein was born in 1950 in Moscow, and, according to his “brief biography” at <a href="http://www.emory.edu/INTELNET/cv_brief.html">http://www.emory.edu/INTELNET</a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null">/cv_brief.html</a>, he graduated from Moscow State University in 1972. From 1978 he was a member of the Union of Soviet Writers specifically for literary studies and criticism, the founder and director of&nbsp;the&nbsp; Laboratory of Contemporary Culture in Moscow. In 1990 he moved to the United States.<br /><br />Something that comes across strongly in the opening pages of Epstein’s book is a sense of optimism not only for the humanities but maybe even for humanity.&nbsp; In short, the humanities should be about becomings and initiations, rather than “a consummated past” (19).<br /><br />Epstein considers the “crisis” in the humanities, and reviews some of its practitioner's more pessimistic prognostications. He suggests that alienation has long been a trait of humanists, who saw themselves as outside of a production and consuming, materialist world. Epstein suggests that this is no longer a meaningful stance to take, because we now live in a world where “ideas rather than material riches makes up the wealth of society” (3). [I’ll have to give this a little thought—we do claim to live in an information world, but consumption of and amassing of material goods is still very much part our society]. If this is the case, humanists gain nothing by cultivating a sense of alienation from the societies of which they are a part…what if humanities were viewed as fully integral parts of the societies&nbsp; from which they have been in long opposition, what would that mean for the humanities? For the world?<br /><br />Epstein calls out the humanities for having taken a turn away from the study of humans to the study of texts. “Humanities stopped being human studies and became textual studies” (2). Criticism rather than creativity became the focus. You could say that the humanities lost site of the power of texts to transform humans, to impart ideas that make us more human as we learn more about ourselves and the world we live in. If the text is the subject and the object, can there be transformation, can the world be changed?<br /><br />While the humanities seek to, in some respects, imitate the sciences, the sciences, claims Epstein, are looking to concepts from the humanities. In coming to an understanding of the universe, in the development of artificial intelligence, in the exploration of consciousness, the sciences need the humanities for its fuzziness, metaphor, concepts of free will, language, investigation of ethical and theological problems, creativity, and intuition. How can one even begin to conceive of and describe the extent and nature of an infinite universe without imagination and metaphor? In considering the humanities' tension between criticism and creativity, he suggests a new term, techno-humanities, which would encourage a move toward the ancient Greek term techne, defined as craftsmanship. As such, techno-humanities aligns the humanities not with the sciences but with artistic creativity, with the power of imagination and the ability to create new concepts that will lead to new ways of thinking and newly constructed paths.&nbsp; Thinking of creation as opposed to criticism, Epstein considers the manifesto. Manifestos propose something new, not yet realized. They are not written by scholars nor are they a result of scholarship, they are acts of creative inventorship that have the power to transform institutions, create movements, foment ideas, and lead to entirely new disciplines. As a rule, we are not taught to write manifestos in academia.<br /><br />Techno-humanities and inventorhsip are two of Epsteins’ Futurlogisms: new words that embrace concepts that do not as yet exist. Some of the terms he offers up in the introduction are culturonics and pragmo-humanities, techno-humanities as already mentioned, and of course, transformative humanities. A futurlogism is a one word manifesto. In turn, Epstein tells us that a manifesto is a book length futurlogism.<br /><br />Finally, Epstein does not see the machine as the enemy to humanities, rather it is a tool; a prospect for innovation.&nbsp; Indeed, the mechanical manipulation of texts by scholars can leave the humanities still mired within the realm of textual studies, still missing the link to how engagement with texts can lead to the transformation of our understanding of self and human society.&nbsp; The tools enable the scholar to “ask new questions” of the text, but where do the answers lead?&nbsp; Epstein wants us to expand our language, create words that help us to envision new meaning and that lead us from ourselves to the rest of the world and back to ourselves. This journey should leave us transformed and make it possible for us to transform the world we live in.<br /><br />Epstein concludes the introduction with the following questionsj (20):<br /><br />What makes a theory interesting?<br />How can these criteria be equally applied to a work of fiction and to a work of scholarship?<br />What is the modality of humanistic discourse?<br />Why does the category of possibility acquire a new meaning in contemporary philosophy?<br />What is understood by research in academia and why should the acquisition of knowledge as its goal be complemented, in our professional orientation, with the value of conceptually creative and hypothetical thinking?<br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Favorite Books and Book Review</div>Rebecca Stuhrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16995942373049536577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2077232405902409852.post-61862912906433543552014-07-20T19:28:00.003-06:002014-07-20T19:28:22.539-06:00Calvino's On a Winter's Night and Haggis's Third Person <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">I am currently reading Italo Calvino's <i>On a Winter's Night a Traveler</i> and have just seen the film "Third Person" written and directed by Paul Haggis. Surprisingly, they have much in common. They are both about the process of writing and feature a tangle of connected or overlapping plots. Of course, when one is absorbed in one thing, it is easy to see it another. I saw "The Grand Budapest Hotel" while deeply immersed in reading W. G. Sebald and was convinced that the movie was an homage to Sebald. Of course it was an homage to a different German writer, Stefan Zweig, but Zweig and Sebald must have a lot in common. I read Sebald so closely, that there is very little that I experience in the world right now that doesn't strike me as Sebaldian. His writing swept broadly across nature and human history so it isn't surprising that I recognize touches of him everywhere. Calvino's novel was written in 1979, and so while I might recognize some Kafkaesque touches (and I would judge that Sebald did like Kafka very much), I can't give Sebald any credit for Calvino--perhaps the credit goes the other way. Calvino's novel is about the art of the novel, reading and readers, language, and plot with some healthy jabs at academic criticism and vocabulary. It is a text that appears and disintegrates and evolves into another text.&nbsp; It is about a writer in friendly conversation with his readers. This whiley narrative persona hooks us (his readers) and drops us, hooks us again and drops us again. It is serious and hilarious. As I read this novel on the trolley got on my way to the movie theater, I kept finding myself smiling or laughing out right. More on Calvino's novel, later ... I hope. But in the meantime, what does this have to do with "Third Person."<br /><br />"Third Person" is also about writing, writers, evolving and disintegrating plots. Haggis uses a structure similar to his film "Crash" (as you'll read in most descriptions of this film). That is, there are several stories going on at one time. The stories have a less straightforward connection than do those that make up "Crash." At first the similarities are in the setting and props. The opening scenes all involve water in some fashion, being frustrated, being late, and getting somewhere in a hurry. One characters swears, cut to another character also swearing, a shirt begins to come off of one person in one scene, and continues coming off of another person in following scene. Soon, larger plot elements of estranged marriages and lost children appear across the narratives. In one case there is an impossible conjunction between two characters who are on different continents. As the film progresses, the similarities become more apparent and these similarities take us back to the writer, Michael who may be in conversation with himself, perhaps his readers, and certainly with the universe. <br /><br />"Third Person" is a kind of puzzle that you come close to figuring out by the end of the movie. Calvino's novel is a kind of game as well, one that he is playing with his readers and most likely with his critics. I am about halfway through. So, more later. In the meantime, find yourself a copy of the novel and see the movie. My copy is from the library at the University of Pennsylvania. I saw "Third Person" right here in Philly at the Ritz 5. </div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Favorite Books and Book Review</div>Rebecca Stuhrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16995942373049536577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2077232405902409852.post-39591204711096685412014-02-08T07:48:00.002-06:002014-07-20T19:31:16.884-06:00Reading Stanley Lombardo's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses and watching Top of the Lake<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><h4 style="text-align: left;">Phaëthon and Callisto</h4><i>How is Ovid's Metamorphoses like the television miniseries <span style="color: black;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_of_the_Lake" target="_blank">Top of the Lake</a>?</span></i><br /><h4 style="text-align: left;">Parents do love their children: Phoebus's misery at the death of Phaëthon</h4>"Meanwhile, Phaëthon's father mourns, bereft<br />Of his bright glory, as if he were in eclipse.<br />He hates the light, hates himself, hates the day.<br />He gives his soul over to grief, to grief adds rage,<br />And refuses his duty to the world." p. 44<br /><h4 style="text-align: left;">Children do not receive proper guidance from their elders: Phoebus grants Phaëthon whatever he wishes as proof of his fatherly love.&nbsp;</h4>"His words were no sooner out than the boy asked<br />To drive his father's chariot for a day<br />And take control of all that horsepower.<br />The father regretted his oath. Three times<br />Four times, he shook his luminous head saying,<br /><br />"'Your words show that my own were rash. I wish<br />That I could take back my promise.'" p. 34<br /><h4 style="text-align: left;">&nbsp;Men are predatory ...&nbsp;</h4>"When she started to talk about which woods to hunt,<br />He stopped her with an embrace, betraying himself<br />With a less than innocent act. She did struggle,<br />As much as a woman can--had you seen it,<br />Juno,you would have been kinder--but what man<br />Can a girl overcome, and who can overcome Jove?" p. 46<br /><br /><b>Sometimes it might be better to undergo a metamorphosis than to carry on in the world as it is.</b><br /><b>Juno turns Callisto into a bear in revenge for Jove's lust for Callisto</b><br /><br />"And now Lycaon's grandson, Arcas, who knew<br />Nothing of his parents, had just turned fifteen.<br />While he was out hunging, scouting the best spots,<br />And enmeshing Arcadia's woods with his nets,<br />He came upon his mother, who stopped in her tracks<br />At the sight of Arcas. She seemed to recognize him.<br />He shrank back from the gaze of those unmoving eyes,<br />Afraid without knowing why; and as the bear<br />Started to advance, panting and eager,<br />He raised his sharp spear to pierce her breast.<br />But the Olympian stoped him, removing at once<br />Both of the principals and the crime from the scene.<br />He whisked the pair up through the void in a whirlwind<br />And set them in the sky as conjoined constellations." p. 49<br /><br />"Top of the Lake was written" by noted New Zealand author Jane Campion and Gerard Lee. It is set in a remote New Zealand town, Top of the Lake, which has a strange misogynistic culture.<br /><br />The women at the piece of land known as Paradise are like Diana and her forest women, not virgins in this case, but self-exiled from the world of men. Unlike Callisto, Tui is not exiled from their company because of her pregnancy, she would have been welcomed and nourished, but even among these forest women, she is not safe. She exiles herself to protect herself from all of the&nbsp; grown men including her father ...She lives like a bear living in the woods and caves throughout the winter, relying on her wits and her young friends to see her through. <br /><br />Robin, the detective is searching for the twelve year old Tui, the father of her unborn child not yet revealed, or who may be, as Tui claims, "no one." In searching for Tui, Robin learns that she and Tui not only share the experience of rape and pregnancy as a child, but they share the same biological father. By the end of the story, the trauma that they have witnessed and experienced leaves them no better off than Callisto, chased by men, who, drunk with their divinity and power, believe they should not be denied anything or anyone. In the final scene of "Top of the Lake," as the two sisters sit at the water's edge, we can imagine them transformed into graceful fish or birds who can leave everything behind, disappear without a trace, but continue to thrive in a newly opened up world known only to them.&nbsp; Even Paradise is too close.<br /><br /><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Favorite Books and Book Review</div>Rebecca Stuhrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16995942373049536577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2077232405902409852.post-18365299340198182812014-01-19T16:36:00.001-06:002014-01-19T16:36:45.343-06:00Morning News Tournament of Books<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Favorite Books has blogged about the The Morning News's [<a class="account-group js-user-profile-link" href="https://twitter.com/TheMorningNews"><span class="username js-action-profile-name">@TheMorningNews</span></a>] Tournament of Books--I was first alerted to this interesting exercise by my good friend and proprietor of <a href="http://marscafe.net/" target="_blank">Mar's Cafe in Des Moin</a><a href="http://marscafe.net/" target="_blank">es</a>, Iowa, Mark Movic (thank you Mark!).<br /><br />Find TMN's announcement here: <br /><a href="http://www.themorningnews.org/article/announcing-the-morning-news-tournament-of-books-x">http://www.themorningnews.org/article/announcing-the-morning-news-tournament-of-books-x</a><br /><br />It is worth it (to me anyway) to list the Long list first because it includes <i>Dissident Gardens</i> and <i>Night Film, </i>both reviewed just now in this very blog. (The long list also includes a book I completely disliked but I won't mention its title or give it any undue publicity).<br /><br /> <em>S</em> by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst<br /> <em>Americanah</em> by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie<br /> <em>At Night We Walk in Circles</em> by Daniel Alarcón<br /> <em>Life After Life</em> by Kate Atkinson<br /> <em>MaddAddam</em> by Margaret Atwood<br /> <em>Traveling Sprinkler</em> by Nicholson Baker<br /> <em>Stay Up With Me</em> by Tom Barbash<br /> <em>Frances and Bernard</em> by Carlene Bauer<br /> <em>The Incrementalists</em> by Steven Brust and Skyler White<br /> <em>We Need New Names</em> by NoViolet Bulawayo<br /> <em>what purpose did i serve in your life</em> by Marie Calloway<br /> <em>Return to Oakpine</em> by Ron Carlson<br /> <em>Eleven Days</em> by Lea Carpenter<br /> <em>The Luminaries</em> by Eleanor Catton<br /> <em>Y</em> by Marjorie Celona<br /> <em>The Tuner of Silences</em> by Mia Couto<br /> <em>Necessary Errors</em> by Caleb Crain<br /> <em>Harvest</em> by Jim Crace<br /> <em>Claire of the Sea Light</em> by Edwidge Danticat<br /> <em>Duplex</em> by Kathryn Davis<br /> <em>Pacific</em> by Tom Drury<br /> <em>The Circle</em> by Dave Eggers<br /> <em>The Virgins</em> by Pamela Erens<br /> <em>Percival Everett</em> <em>by Virgil Russell</em> by Percival Everett<br /> <em>The Panopticon</em> by Jenni Fagan<br /> <em>Middle C</em> by William H. Gass<br /> <em>&amp; Sons</em> by David Gilbert<br /> <em>The Signature of All Things</em> by Elizabeth Gilbert<br /> <em>Hild</em> by Nicola Griffith<br /> <em>The Explanation for Everything</em> by Lauren Grodstein<br /> <em>Tirza</em> by Arnon Grunberg<br /> <em>Local Souls</em> by Allan Gurganus<br /> <em>The Morels</em> by Christopher Hacker<br /> <em>Enon</em> by Paul Harding<br /> <em>NOS4A2</em> by Joe Hill<br /> <em>You Are One of Them</em> by Elliott Holt<br /> <em>How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia</em> by Mohsin Hamid<br /> <em>And the Mountains Echoed</em> by Khaled Hosseini<br /> <em>Mira Corpora</em> by Jeff Jackson<br /> <em>The Residue Years</em> by Mitchell S. Jackson<br /> <em>The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards</em> by Kristopher Jansma<br /> <em>Doctor Sleep</em> by Stephen King<br /> <em>The Dinner</em> by Herman Koch<br /> <em>The Flamethrowers</em> by Rachel Kushner<br /> <em>The Lowland</em> by Jhumpa Lahiri<br /> <em>Long Division</em> by Kiese Laymon<br /> <em>Dissident Gardens</em> by Jonathan Lethem<br /> <em>Two Boys Kissing</em> by David Levithan<br /> <em>The Facades</em> by Eric Lundgren<br /> <em>Woke Up Lonely</em> by Fiona Maazel<br /> <em>A Constellation of Vital Phenomena</em> by Anthony Marra<br /> <em>A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing</em> by Eimear McBride<br /> <em>The Good Lord Bird</em> by James McBride<br /> <em>TransAtlantic</em> by Colum McCann<br /> <em>Hill William</em> by Scott McClanahan<br /> <em>The Woman Upstairs</em> by Claire Messud<br /> <em>The Son</em> by Philipp Meyer<br /> <em>Want Not</em> by Jonathan Miles<br /> <em>The Returned</em> by Jason Mott<br /> <em>Tampa</em> by Alissa Nutting<br /> <em>A Tale for the Time Being</em> by Ruth Ozeki<br /> <em>Red Moon</em> by Benjamin Percy<br /> <em>Night Film</em> by Marisha Pessl<br /> <em>Rontel</em> by Sam Pink<br /> <em>Visitation Street</em> by Ivy Pochoda<br /> <em>Bleeding Edge</em> by Thomas Pynchon<br /> <em>Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish</em> by David Rakoff<br /> <em>Eleanor &amp; Park</em> by Rainbow Rowell<br /> <em>In Times of Fading Light</em> by Eugen Ruge<br /> <em>All That Is</em> by James Salter<br /> <em>Tenth of December</em> by George Saunders<br /> <em>Motherlunge</em> by Kirstin Scott<br /> <em>Ghana Must Go</em> by Taiye Selasi<br /> <em>The Woman Who Lost Her Soul</em> by Bob Shacochis<br /> <em>Mary Coin</em> by Marissa Silver<br /> <em>The Silence and the Roar</em> by Nihad Sirees<br /> <em>Sisterland</em> by Curtis Sittenfeld<br /> <em>Brewster</em> by Mark Slouka<br /> <em>The Burgess Boys</em> by Elizabeth Strout<br /> <em>The Goldfinch</em> by Donna Tartt<br /> <em>The Isle of Youth</em> by Laura van den Berg<br /> <em>The Sound of Things Falling</em> by Juan Gabriel Vásquez<br /> <em>The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.</em> by Adelle Waldman<br /> <em>The Kings and Queens of Roam</em> by Daniel Wallace<br /> <em>The President in Her Towers</em> by Tom Whalen<br /> <em>The Last Policeman</em> by Ben Winters<br /> <em>The Interestings</em> by Meg Wolitzer<br /> <em>The Maid’s Version</em> by Daniel Woodrell<br /> <em>Wash</em> by Margaret Wrinkle<br /> <em>The People in the Trees</em> by Hanya Yanagihara<br /> <em>Snow Hunters</em> by Paul Yoon<br /> <em>Lotería</em> by Mario Alberto Zambrano<br /> <em>Stupid Children</em> by Lenore Zion<br /><br />Not a bad way to stay in touch with the year's best (except for that one I won't be mentioning)? Where to start? Here is the short list:<br /><br /><h2> Finalists for the 2014 Tournament of Books</h2><ul><li> <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/hardcover:sale:9781594631719:19.57?&amp;PID=29867"><em>At Night We Walk in Circles</em> by Daniel Alarcón</a></li><li> <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/hardcover:sale:9780316074315:18.90?&amp;PID=29867"><em>The Luminaries</em> by Eleanor Catton</a></li><li> <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/tradepaper:sale:9781926845951:11.17?&amp;PID=29867"><em>The Tuner of Silences</em> by Mia Couto</a></li><li> <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/hardcover:sale:9780670024858:20.27?&amp;PID=29867"><em>The Signature of All Things</em> by Elizabeth Gilbert</a></li><li> <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/hardcover:sale:9781594487293:18.87?&amp;PID=29867"><em>How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia</em> by Mohsin Hamid</a></li><li> <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/tradepaper:sale:9780385346856:9.80?&amp;PID=29867"><em>The Dinner</em> by Herman Koch</a></li><li> <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/hardcover:sale:9780307265746:19.57?&amp;PID=29867"><em>The Lowland</em> by Jhumpa Lahiri</a></li><li> <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/tradepaper:sale:9781932841725:10.50?&amp;PID=29867"><em>Long Division</em> by Kiese Laymon</a></li><li> <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/hardcover:sale:9781594486340:19.57?&amp;PID=29867"><em>The Good Lord Bird</em> by James McBride</a></li><li> <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/tradepaper:sale:9780985023553:10.47?&amp;PID=29867"><em>Hill William</em> by Scott McClanahan</a></li><li> <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/hardcover:sale:9780062120397:19.59?&amp;PID=29867"><em>The Son</em> by Philipp Meyer</a></li><li> <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/tradepaper:sale:9780143124870:11.20?&amp;PID=29867"><em>A Tale for the Time Being</em> by Ruth Ozeki</a></li><li> <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/hardcover:sale:9781250012579:13.29?&amp;PID=29867"><em>Eleanor &amp; Park</em> by Rainbow Rowell</a></li><li> <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/hardcover:sale:9780316055437:21.00?&amp;PID=29867"><em>The Goldfinch</em> by Donna Tartt</a></li><li> <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/hardcover:sale:9780385536776:18.87?&amp;PID=29867"><em>The People in the Trees</em> by Hanya Yanagihara</a></li><li> [Winner of the Pre-Tournament Playoff Round]</li></ul><h2> Pre-Tournament Playoff Round</h2><ul><li> <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/tradepaper:sale:9780316176491:12.60?&amp;PID=29867"><em>Life After Life</em> by Kate Atkinson</a></li><li> <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9781555976385-1"><em>Woke Up Lonely</em> by Fiona Maazel</a></li></ul>&nbsp;All the links take you to Powell's book store, but don't forget to check out Philly's bookstores, <a href="http://www.pennbookcenter.com/%E2%80%8E" target="_blank">The Penn Book Center</a>, <a href="http://www.foxbookshop.com/%E2%80%8E" target="_blank">Joseph Fox bookshop</a>, <a href="http://bindlestiffbooks.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Bindlestiff's</a> (right in my neighborhood!), House of our Own on Spruce Street in University City, and Penn's own hardworking bookstore, <a href="http://upenn.bncollege.com/" target="_blank">The Penn Bookstore</a> (you won't find books on their Web site, but they do have them!)<br /><br />The tournament of books is something along the lines of the collegiate basketball playoffs. Judges take on pairs of books, with only one from each pair moving on to the next round. You can follow the judging and the reviews at The Morning News. <br /><br />&nbsp;Go Tournament of Books!<br /><br />One last plug in this blog posting of plugs. Many of these books have been reviewed at <a href="http://www.full-stop.net/" target="_blank">Full-Stop: Reviews, Interviews, and Marginalia</a>, so please check it out. <br /><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Favorite Books and Book Review</div>Rebecca Stuhrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16995942373049536577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2077232405902409852.post-81037568118755304742014-01-19T16:07:00.001-06:002014-01-19T16:09:21.505-06:00Jonathan Lethem's Dissident Gardens<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Jonathan Lethem. Dissident Gardens: A Novel. Doubleday, 2013.<br /><br />One of my favorite Jonathan Lethem books was his 1997 novel <i>As She Climbed Across the Table. </i>This is a great comic novel of academia. The main character refers to himself as Mr. Interdisciplinary and his girlfriend, a physicist, falls in love with the lack she and her colleagues have created in the lab (the "she" that crawls across the table...into the lack). I bring this up, because this novel is rarely listed in the blurbs on the backs of Lethem novels that extol Lethem's literary prowess [Wait -- it is mentioned in his biographical blurb on the back flap!]. One of my best friends, someone with his own brand of literary prowess, recommended this 1997 gem to me and it remains at the top of my favorites ... so check it out. I'm talking myself into reading it again. <br /><br />But, this isn't a review of an academic lack, this is a review of <i>Dissident Gardens</i>--something very far from the light and easy <i>Table. </i>This novel requires some attention and thought and probably some re-reading--but don't let this dissuade you--it also rewards this same attention and thought.&nbsp; Do you like to have something to think about and ponder? <i>Dissident Gardens</i> provides a picture of post war (World War II) America from the perspective of New York City and the American Communist Party--or at least a few of its most devoted. [And before I'm done I have to say something about Inside Llewyn Davis (the film) and Dawn Powell's <i>Golden Spur</i>, and Philadelphia in fiction.]<br /><br />This novel deserves a visualization. It would start with Rose Angrush Zimmer at the top, the matriarch, conscience, and avenging angel of Sunnyside Gardens. The novel opens with Rose's ejection from the local Communist Party cell. As the novel progresses, it is clear that Rose may be the one true remaining Communist in the American Communist Party with her daughter Miriam and her nephew Lenny who were brought into the fold by Rose willingly or not, both of whom come to separate but early and tragic deaths. Lethem is all about character in this novel. Rose haunts everyone--driving them away with her intensity and her bordering-on-crazy single-mindedness. She is the constant in this novel that spans decades, but remains geographically centered in Queens and Manhattan, with diversions to Philly and rural Pennsylvania, Germany and Nicaragua. <br /><br />Back to the visualization: Rose's daughter Miriam is next in line (by my estimation) in importance. Her father, Albert, also a Communist, leaves Rose and baby Miriam to do the work of the party in Germany. Later, we learn something about Albert in the letters that he writes to Miriam after she re-establish contact with her long absent father. Miriam has all the iron will and determination of her mother, forged through her constant rebellion against Rose's authority. She marries at a young age, Tommy Gogan, one of the Gogan Boys, who together and apart, garner moderate fame during the NYC folk revival. Miriam and Tommy bring Sergius into the world, and Sergius spends most of his childhood and young adult years at a Quaker school in Pennsylvania following the death of both of his parents in the jungles of Nicaragua. <br /><br />So, we have Rose and Miriam, Albert a bit off to the left, Tommy and Sergius a little below and to the right of Miriam. Now a little to the left and below Rose, we have the American Communist Party and Douglas Lookins, Rose's African American cop lover. Her affair with Lookins catapults her out of the party--is it because he is a cop? is it because he is Black? Either way, the American Communist Party is wrong and Rose is right. His son Cicero becomes Rose's protege. Under her vise-like tutelage, Cicero rises to the top of schools and scholarship competitions to land at Princeton, and then, ultimately, as a professor at a small liberal arts school in Maine. Cicero, like Miriam, does not know whether to love or hate Rose, to be grateful for the direction in which she rocket launched him, or to resent her powerful grip.<br /><br />Archie Bunker is another of Rose's lovers and it is up to you, the reader, to decide whether he is a flesh and blood man who in every way resembles Archie Bunker, or an entity existing only in Rose's mind. Not least among the characters, and perhaps the most tragic of all the characters, for being the most lovable and the most unlovable a the same time, is Lenny Angrush, a brilliant chess player, expert in numismatics, devoted Communist and man of the people, baseball fan, and hopelessly, tragically in love with his younger cousin Miriam. Lenny's judgment fails him and puts him in the way of the blood thirsty, almost evaporated into thin air.<br /><br />There you have the beginnings of a visualization and yet you still know so little of this novel. Each character has their own tragic center. Rose tenaciously holding onto everything even as she loses everything and everyone who has ever been important to her. Cicero, not her own child, is the last living member of her circle to remember and care for Rose. Cicero is himself an orphan, with Rose being his only connection to family as he is hers. After her death, she continues to be very much part of his burden of memory. Sergius also survives Rose, but of all the Angrush's he is the only one to be mostly untouched by Rose. Orphaned at 8, he is prevented from being taken under Rose's wing by his a letter that his mother posts to her friend Stella Kim and that arrives posthumously. Sergius barely remembers his parents having worked to forget them and the brief period in which his life overlapped with theirs. Miriam, Rose's only child, is driven by her love-hate relationship with her mother and mirrors her mother's tenacious need to control and mold. Miriam embodies the peace and non-violent movements of the 60s. She and Tommy leave Sergius in the hands of the Pennsylvania Quakers as they seek to kindle their folk sensibilities within the Nicaraguan revolution. <br /><br />Here I have to digress. While reading <i>Dissident Gardens</i>, I took a short break and read Dawn Powell's <i>Golden Spur.</i> In her novel, the Golden Spur is a bar frequented by artists. This is in the 50s. By the time of Lethem's narrative, the Golden Spur is a home to the folk movement. This is the same early, pre-Dylan era that is portrayed in&nbsp; the film "Inside Llewyn Davis." Interesting that this novel and film should come out so closely together. Powell's novel was written in the 50s, so the only coincidence is that I read it at the same time that I was reading <i>Dissident Gardens</i> and viewing <i>Inside Llewyn Davis</i>. In Tommy Gogan's portion of the novel, Lethem has Tommy thinking about his place among the folks as Bob Dylan takes over the stage and the air waives:&nbsp; "He was disgruntled less on his own behalf than on that of Van Ronk, Clayton, so many others, all swallowed and disgorged, all eclipsed, all savaged by the splenetic fusillade pouring from the radio . . . to think yourself defined, however cursory one's own talent, by immersion in a collective voicing deeper than that of which any sole practitioner could be capable, and then to have every third remark be did you ever open for <i>Dylan</i>, did you ever meet <i>Dylan, </i>was <i>Dylan</i> there is <i>Dylan</i> coming was it like <i>Dylan </i>I think I saw <i>Dylan </i>he's a second rate <i>Dylan...." </i>Tommy finds his last inspiration far away from Dylan with first love and muse Miriam in Nicaragua.<br /><br />Tommy and Miriam's trip to Nicaragua leaves Sergius to reinvent himself. He, the most distant from Rose, and the least affected by her often cruel intensity, brings the novel to a close. Trying to reconnect himself with the ghosts of his family, Sergius seeks out Cicero, a meeting that does neither one of them any good. As the novel ends, Sergius is making taking a personal stand against Homeland Security in a nondescript room in a nondescript airport in Maine. <br /><br />More about <a href="http://www.jonathanlethem.com/" target="_blank">Jonathan Lethem</a>.<br /><br /><br /><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Favorite Books and Book Review</div>Rebecca Stuhrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16995942373049536577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2077232405902409852.post-70398768392801867222014-01-19T14:35:00.001-06:002016-07-02T18:27:56.848-06:00Infoglut by Mark Andrejevic<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><h4 style="text-align: left;">Mark Andrejevic's <i>Infoglut*: How Too Much Information is Changing the Way we Think and Know. </i>Routledge, 2013.</h4><br />We have all been hearing about Big Data. Many a magazine has devoted an issue to the topic, and libraries are exploring ways to provide access to and storage for Big Data in all of its many manifestations across the disciplines. In the humanities, at least one way that we think about big data is in terms of large searchable text databases derived from collections of novels, letters, newspapers, perhaps legislation, the files in full text databases, or even phone books. When we talk about mining these troves of raw text data, we take note of the way a query is constructed and the kind of stop list that is created because we know that these things can drive our results. We know that results are not precisely replicable. Conducting research with big data in the humanities requires attention to detail and process, but it seems pleasantly benign after reading <i>Infoglut</i>. <br /><br />Variations on this catchy title carry through the table of contents with the chapters “Intelligence Glut,” “Emotional Glut,” “Future Glut,” “Glut Instinct,” “Neuro-Glut,” “Theory Glut,” and finally, “Cutting through the Glut.” These clever and descriptive chapter headings are the only cheery aspects of the book. For good news on our info world, cozy up with Richard Harper’s <i>Texture: Human Expression in the Age of Communications Overload</i> (MIT Press, 2010). Settle in for some serious reflection on life as a consumed consumer as you embark on the journey through Infoglut. <br /><br />Andrejevic takes us through the monitoring, tracking, quantifying and auctioning off of our online lives as we share on social media, shop, and send emails. He describes a “post-truth” world of politics beyond the imagining of George Orwell, that takes advantage of the noise of information to float half-truths and inaccuracies, and you can add post-narrative and post-comprehension to your political vocabulary as well.&nbsp; This is just the smallest taste of Andrejevic’s dark, but carefully argued text. While we see the advantages of the rapid advancement in technologies, we are not surprised that it comes with its cost. Server farms are energy hungry, privacy is easily relinquished, and truth is hard to come by. We are not strangers to these concerns in the library profession and this book reminds us of our roles in providing access without discrimination, protecting the privacy of our communities, and making available a wide range of perspectives with an eye to quality and reliability. So, I encourage you to take a look at a chapter or more of this book, but cue up your favorite comedy before calling it a night. <br /><br /><br /><br />*Infoglut, according to the OED has been in the English language since at least 1984 appearing in the book <i>The Netweaver's Sourcebook. </i>It (almost) achieved title status early on in David Shenk's 1997 <i>Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut</i><span class="noIndent" id="eid161017720"><em><a class="sourcePopup" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" rel="0089403"></a></em>, and again in the <i>Guardian</i> in 2005. It also appears as the title to a book, the title of which, sounds more like a party:&nbsp; <i>Salsa Dancing into the Social Sciences: Research in an Age of Infoglut</i> by Kristin Luker (You can get this book at the <a href="http://know.freelibrary.org/vufind/Record/1670966" target="_blank">Free Library of Philadelphia</a>). </span>Find <i>Infoglut</i> at a <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/823472873" target="_blank">library near you</a>.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Any thoughts on info glut? There is plenty of room in this blog for a little more. <br /><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Favorite Books and Book Review</div>Rebecca Stuhrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16995942373049536577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2077232405902409852.post-72357056834245423822014-01-19T14:04:00.004-06:002014-01-19T14:04:38.712-06:00Giersbach on Night Film by Marisha Pessl<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><h2 style="text-align: left;">An Artist Needs Darkness</h2><h4 style="text-align: left;">Marisha Pessl's <i>Night Film</i>, Random House, 2013. </h4><h4 style="text-align: left;">By <a href="http://allotropiclucubrations.blogspot.com/%E2%80%8E" target="_blank">Walter Giersbach&nbsp;</a> <a href="http://allotropiclucubrations.blogspot.com/%E2%80%8E"><br /></a></h4><br />“Special Projects in Calamity Physics” marked 27-year-old Marisha Pessl’s debut in 2006, garnering a front-page New York Times Book Review.&nbsp; Pessl writes with a unique “voice” as she follows motherless teenager Blue van Meer into school and introduces a cast of idiosyncratic characters.&nbsp; A teacher is murdered, Dad is not who he appears to be, and the teenaged Bluebloods are uniquely quirky.&nbsp; Is Blue discovering life or is she being led by forces she doesn’t recognize?&nbsp; A tough-but-rewarding read.”<br /><br />My review above was published November 2012 by the Asbury Park Press.&nbsp; I was overjoyed to see that Pessl has followed her debut work with “Night Film,” another novel in which things aren’t what they seem.&nbsp; This captivating almost-thriller follows a newsman’s search for Cordova, the underground film maker who hasn’t been seen in years.&nbsp; Cordova had won a libel suit against the narrator, but in the interest of news the writer begins investigating the death of Cordova’s 24-year-old daughter Ashley.&nbsp; Was she an apparent suicide by falling down the elevator shaft of an abandoned building in New York’s Chinatown— or was she pushed?&nbsp; Careful steps through a Funhouse Arcade of deception, mystery, supernatural manifestations and coincidences take the narrator into the lives of a cult figure.<br /><br />Interspersed with the narrative are graphic pages from Web sites, police reports, news clippings and ephemera that tell the tale alongside the narrative arc of the plot.&nbsp; Like David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas,” this is less a straight-forward story and more the unfolding of characters, motives and existential questions. <br /><br />Key to peeling away layers of plot deception is Cordova’s former wife, who explains, <br /><br />“Darkness.&nbsp; I know it’s hard to fathom today, but a true artist needs darkness in order to create.&nbsp; It gives him power.&nbsp; His invisibility.&nbsp; The less the world knows about him, her whereabouts, his origins and secret methods, the more strength he has.&nbsp; The more inanities about him the world eats, the smaller and drier his art until it shrinks and shrivels into a Lucky Charms marshmallow to be consumed in a little bowl with milk for breakfast.”<br /><br />We need more Cordovas…and more Pessls.&nbsp; She’s marvelous as a stylist.&nbsp; The now 35-year-old writer describes, for example, a young hat check employee at the Four Seasons: <br /><br />According to the police report, she’d been working here only a few weeks.&nbsp; She was about 5’7” and scrawny as a question mark, with pale blond hair in a French twist — curls around her face channeling alfalfa.&nbsp; She wore a brown skirt and brown blouse too big for her — the restaurant uniform visible shoulder pads sitting unevenly over her frame….<br /><br />“Good evening, sir,” she said brightly, removing her glasses, revealing big blue eyes and delicate features that would have made her an “it girl” about four hundred years ago….&nbsp; She was wearing harsh pink lipstick, which didn’t look like it’d been applied in good light or within two feet of a mirror.”<br /><br />Don’t let this emerging literary giant — Pessl, not the hat check girl — pass you by!<br /><br />For more on <a href="http://marishapessl.com/" target="_blank">Marisha Pessl</a><br />Find more reviews by Walter Giersbach in this blog or even more at his own blog: <a href="http://allotropiclucubrations.blogspot.com/%E2%80%8E"><cite><b>allotropiclucubrations.blogspot.com/‎</b></cite></a></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Favorite Books and Book Review</div>Rebecca Stuhrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16995942373049536577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2077232405902409852.post-47708850894290472252013-08-07T17:29:00.002-06:002013-08-07T17:29:48.672-06:00Long Time No See by Dermot Healy<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Dermot Healy. <i>Long Time No See</i>. Viking, 2012.<br /><br />I loved this book, and, after having put aside a couple of books without finishing them, it reminded me about how wonderful it can be to read an excellent novel. This story takes place in an Irish coastal village in 2006. In many ways it could take place at any time, but we are reminded from time to time that it is in our own time as mobile phones are mentioned or a recent popular song. The narrator is a young man who is just finishing school and preparing for college. We are not privy to his thoughts, it more as though we are hearing what he hears and seeing what he sees. The novel has plot elements, but it isn't plot driven. Overall, we realize what doesn't change with the times is the importance of community, friendship, family, and caring about others. This is not a sentimental book with a simplified message.<br /><br />Philip, or Mister Psyche as he is called by his granduncle, is spending his summer picking up work around the village, assisting his father on jobs, and looking out for his aged granduncle and his granduncle's aged friend, The Bird. In his spare time, he is building a wall with stones from the ruins of an nearby ancient monastery. Fierce storms, long hours of work, concern and worry for failing friends and family members, loneliness&nbsp; are all part of this novel. The old are lonely in their old age, the many foreigners, particularly from Eastern Europe, are lonely in their distance from home, the young are lonely as they contemplate leaving home or the loss of a friend. But as Philip tells the story, everyone is cared for by someone else--it comes naturally and is a way of life.<br /><br />The narrative style is interesting and takes a few pages to settle into ... because we're thrown into the story without context. It isn't exactly stream of consciousness, but it isn't a straightforward telling of a tale. Details emerge and add to the overall impression creating a complete picture. I will look forward to other novels by Dermot Healy. </div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Favorite Books and Book Review</div>Rebecca Stuhrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16995942373049536577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2077232405902409852.post-8057087374996513722013-04-14T06:50:00.003-06:002014-08-23T19:18:10.754-06:00Mikhail Epstein. Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto (1)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Epstein, Mikhail. <i>Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto</i>. NY: Bloomsbury, 2012.<br /><br />Epstein is diving into the broad discipline of humanities and starting anew. I hope to bit by bit write about what he is laying out in his manifesto. Writing from a Russian intellectual tradition he looks at, among other Russian intellectuals, Mikhail Bakhtin, in particular comparing his ideas of community, birth, unity, and culture to those of Foucault (to greatly oversimplify). Epstein does this in part to support his concept of moving from a world of post- to a world of proto-.<br /><br />In this post I will just write a few lines about his idea of word formation. In Chapter 6, entitled "Semiurgy: From Language Analysis to Language Synthesis," Epstein explores that idea of word coinage and formation. He briefly describes three types of sign making, combinative (most textual writing and in particular philosophical and literary writing), descriptive (words and their definitions as in dictionaries for instance) and the third being formative, or sign formation, the introduction of new signs into language. Epstein himself is developing a new vocabulary throughout his book, which includes an eight page glossary of new vocabulary. He predicts that "sign makers" and "sign givers" will become as important as "law makers," because he sees these two distinct activities as complementary. "[L]aw makes everyone subject to self-restriction, while the new sign creates for everyone a new opportunity for self-expression" (98). The combination of signs (as in philosophical and literary writing) will move from the bringing together of old signs, to the generation of new signs.<br /><br />Along with the creation of new signs comes the evolution of new concepts bringing with it "new layers of meanings" and "new shades and nuances in the range of feelings, actions and intentions" (99). As an example Epstein presents nine new words for love including dislove, "a deeper feeling than 'dislike', a matter of personal relationship rather than taste" and siamorous, "closely connected by a psychic symbiosis based on love" (100-101). Epstein calls these new words protologisms, "a freshly minted word not yet widely accepted" (101). The name for the next phase for the newly created word as it moves into common use (aided by the prevalence of the Internet) is neologism.<br /><br />To support this active development of language, Epstein calls for a fourth branch of Semiotics that he calls Semionics (the first three being semantics, syntactics,&nbsp; and pragmatics). Semionics would be the <i>study</i> of the activity of generating new signs (99) complimenting Semiurgy, which is the <i>practice</i> itself of creating new signs.<br /><br />Epstein talks about the development of new words and the augmentation of language in the same way a cosmologist might talk about the universe. He exhorts all those tied to words and language to give back.<br /><br />"A new word is like a mini-meme; it contains the strongest power of propagation, since the maximal meaning is generated with the minimal sign. Cultures that worship Logos as the Word that was before everything must also pay attention to the Neologism, or anticipation of the new word, still silent in the depths of language, until the moment when it bursts into life. In this respect, I wish to make a plea to all writers, lecturers, orators, linguists, literary scholars and teachers, and journalists. We are all users of language's treasures, drawing from it words and phrases and turning them into the means of our very existence; in this way, language value turns into monetary value. We are all dependent on language for our lives. However, language has no Internal Revenue Service agency, to which each of us must pay back with at least one new word for each thousand or tens of thousands of words we have used. And yet, we still can repay our debt (if only in part), enriching language with new words. Let it be a matter of our professional honor" (104). </div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Favorite Books and Book Review</div>Rebecca Stuhrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16995942373049536577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2077232405902409852.post-36070294475952529362013-04-07T15:40:00.001-06:002013-04-07T15:40:30.465-06:00Greek and Roman Historians, II: Should We Read Them <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Revisiting <i>Greek and Roman Historians: Information and Misinformation</i> by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Grant_%28author%29" target="_blank">Michael Grant</a> (Routledge, 1995) and in particular his penultimate chapter, "Should We Read the Ancient Historians?"<br /><br />Not surprisingly, the answer is yes and in some respects an unqualified yes. The qualifications make their way into the assessment if you ask, "should we read them in order to know exactly what happened in ancient history?" Grant takes a quick look at all histories, whether written last week or a couple of thousand years ago. He writes that "the truth is hard to capture" despite the fact that it is the truth toward which historians aim. Grant evokes the 19th century and its turn toward a scientific approach to the reliance on facts, events, and dates supported by evidence found in documents and observation. But facts are of little use without interpretation. Historians must present the facts, as well as the ideas behind the facts. He quotes Ranke who wrote that historians must, "show why things happened and . . . the forces which were at work." Ranke urged the historian to note "changes, relationships, causes and consequences, and to explain the sequence and connection of events" (92).<br /><br />But science is not without its biases and how we think, the values we've inherited, color or influence what we see and how we interpret what we see. No amount of science or evidence can do away with the bias that comes with recording history. Isn't this why we exhort students to critically assess the sources they are working with--author affiliation and previous works, supporting entities such as publishers and associations, and sources cited in any particular work. Isn't this why we have controversies over smoking, global climate change, immigration policy, the trade offs of nuclear power, and so on.<br /><br />Grant offers that each generation of historian has a greater share of historical experience than the previous generation, but despite the availability of more and more accurate documentation, each historian is a product of his or her time and place. He offers three caveats regarding the difficulty of objectivity--concepts to keep in mind when reading history:<br /><br />1) Every age rewrites history and revisits the past, this can shed new light and new perspective, but, he writes, "that can result in anachronism when the past is being considered" (92). <br /><br />2) Any person, any one writing history, cannot escape their own personality. Grant quotes Theodore Mommsen to elucidate this, "history is neither written nor made without love and hate" (92).&nbsp; In addition, he invokes Benedetto Croce to point out that "history is always contemporary history," and the past is meaningless "except as it exists for us" (93). Historians are always present in their work.<br /><br />3) Finally, historians have to select. Grant devotes a significant amount of attention to this detail in the body of his book. Historians can only select from what they know--what is buried or otherwise lost might reveal a different story, but it is a story that is lost to us.<br /><br />Grant views the ancient historians as working within the genre of literature. They are literary artists, focusing on people and events they deemed to be important. They elaborated, created speeches, made choices about which tales and stories to incorporate and which to leave out; they aimed to please their audience. Despite this, they are our best single source of information, and they represent their particular universe regardless of the veracity of their assertions. Grant recommends that readers apply literary analysis when interpreting the ancients. "The glory of the ancient historians is unrelated to any particular age, because it is timeless. We must read them because of the&nbsp; wonderful and influential literature that they wrote" (99). </div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Favorite Books and Book Review</div>Rebecca Stuhrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16995942373049536577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2077232405902409852.post-81777033571698114682013-03-31T15:00:00.002-06:002014-09-06T08:43:58.846-06:00The Prisoner of Paradise by Romesh Gunesekera<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><a href="http://romeshg2.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Romesh Gunesekera</a>. <i>The Prisoner of Paradise</i>. Bloomsbury, 2012<br /><br />This novel of the Colonial English and to a minor extent the French and their colonized subjects takes place on the island of Mauritius in 1825. Lucy, recently orphaned has traveled from England with her Aunt Betty to settle on the island and all the promise of a new start with her aunt and Uncle George who live at the lovely garden estate of Ambleside. Uncle George has been entrusted with Lucy's inheritance, which is intended to be enough to allow her to live independently (married or unmarried) when she comes of age. Uncle George has an official position and sees the island as full of potential for advancement and reward. "...[T]he British victory in 1810 ended ninety years of French vacillation; ...the subsequent treaty of Paris marked the start of a great enterprise where control of the Cape, Ceylon and Mauritius, would ensure that trade with India would be for ever British and noble" (18). Besides the French and the British, the island was the enforced home to an enslaved population of prisoners from Britain's other nearby colonies. Interestingly, the <i>"prisoner"</i> in the title of the novel is singular, but there are many prisoners, literally and metaphorically, in this novel. <br /><br />In many ways, <i>Prisoner of Paradise</i> resembles E.M. Forester's <i>Passage to India</i>, but with the perspective of the colonized more intimately portrayed. In addition, Gunesekera juxtaposes the condition and status of the colonized, both slave and independent to that of, in this case, British women. The island environment suggests freedom from social constraints of class, rigid behavioral codes, and divisions formed by racial, ethnic, and cultural differences. And yet, the island is full of enslaved prisoners, Lucy and her aunt or at the mercy of the whims of the uncle. And even Uncle George and those who share his power and privilege must adhere to a some vestige of social decorum. Other central characters in the novel include the gifted linguist Don Lambodar and the exiled Prince for whom he is a translator, and the prince's cousin Asoka, all from Sri Lanka. They have their own sense of the barbarity and inscrutability of their Island hosts. <br /><br />Lucy and her Aunt Betty share much in their view of their location and condition. Betty, coming from an older generation, has a carefully constructed view of her place in the household and working within the confines of an unhappy marriage, has made the most of her situation. She has maintained a kind of control through developing a careful routine and maintaining a standard for her expectations. In addition she has lavished much care on her garden even to the extent of creating a private space where she can be assured of being left to herself. Aunt Betty is strikingly different from her husband in that she treats her servants respectfully, addresses them by name and has provided opportunities for education and personal development. She lives perhaps unconsciously by a code of humanity, rather than by a colonialist's code. George is essentially a slave master, referring to his servants as boy or by other insulting terms. He must flaunt his status and power and is at the same time corrupted by both. <br /><br />Lucy, was raised in a less restrictive environment and arrives on the island ready and waiting to be experience freedom. Her head is filled with the romantic novels of travel and adventure she grew up reading. From her reading, Lucy has a particular expectation for what the "Orient" has to offer her. She is immediately, though guardedly, taken with Don Lambodar, the handsome and cultivated multi-linguist in the service of the exiled Prince. She and Don Lambodar are a perfect illustration of cross cultural miscommunication. Neither understands the other despite being strongly attracted to one another. While their relationship is not explicitly forbidden, it is on the threshold of impropriety.<br /><br />Aunt Betty is anxious for Lucy to marry and becomes more anxious as the narrative plays out. Aunt Betty's marriage gradually reveals itself to Lucy as a very unhappy situation--not to be sought after. Aunt Betty's husband, George, at first appears to be a jovial, indulgent husband and uncle, but his character becomes more and more sinister as the novel progresses. There are hints that his interest in Lucy, even as a small child, was more carnal than protective. His tendency toward drunkenness brings out this dangerous side of his character. While the reader senses the precarious situation of the household within the triangle of Betty, George, and Lucy, there is never any indication that Lucy considers herself to be threatened by her uncle's prurient interest in her. <br /><br />Lucy's mind is on imagining her own freedom and her waxing and waning interest in Don Lambodar as the household's tenuous balance begins to shift toward instability. While she begins to note that things are amiss, she really has no sense of what the troubles might be. Aunt Betty's ability to put appearances and practicality ahead of calling her husband to account of his marital lapses, has lulled George into a false sense of security. In a final hubristic act, George bring his mistress and her daughter into the household to act as a maid. Lucy, thinking that mother and daughter are sisters, brings them into the house when her aunt is not at home. Although Lucy is unaware of their connection to George, Aunt Betty is very much aware of who they are and why they are there. Eulalia, the mother and mistress (and daughter to a respected former slave on the island), shows a lack of respect to Aunt Betty and makes no pretense to playing out her role as housekeeper. <br /><br />In the meantime, as neither slave, nor prisioner, nor British, Don Lambodar finds himself in an uneasy role between his social position of more or less equality with the empowered and his sympathies for the oppressed. They, the enslaved prisoners, seek him out as one with connections and the ability to communicate. But his efforts to speak on behalf of the prisoners is hampered by his inability to understand the minds of those with whom he attempts to negotiate. He no better understands the workings of Lucy's mind than he understands the prejudice and grasping, mean spiritedness of George and his ilk on the island. <br /><br />This arrival of Eulalia and her daughter, coincides with Don Lambodar's decision to let Lucy know exactly how he feels by letter. At the same time Lucy has decided to treat Don Lambodar more kindly and to try to make up for other times when she has been curt and unfriendly to him. There are hints that George has rashly dealt with Lucy's inheritance. As she counts on her future independence, the freedom that will come with that independence, and her ability to choose or not choose marriage, it becomes apparent to the reader, and possibly the Aunt, that George has done the unthinkable by speculating away Lucy's inheritance. With this storm brewing within the household, a terrible hurricane sweeps across the island, overturning everything: a storm within a storm. <br /><br />In the end Lucy finds her dreamed of freedom elusive. Don Lambodar, with fewer expectations, perhaps, survives the devastation of the storms, but does not emerge unscarred. Uncle George, having indulged his pride in bringing his mistress into the house that he shares with his wife, finds that pride does not come without a fall. Aunt Betty loses everything in the storm, but she retains her humanity and thwarts a colonial justice that favors the conquering class. She does not forget Don Lambodar nor the attachment she knows that Lucy felt for him. <br /><br />Aunt Betty's final gesture to Don Lambodar and her tragic triumph over George provide an unexpectedness to the novel's conclusion. There is a point of resistance; the desires for change seem&nbsp; stronger than the impoverished morality and selfish motivations of those trying to maintain a kind of unnatural status quo. The combination, however, of entrenched power and wealth are apparent, overshadowing the small aberration caused by Betty's final acts. Lucy's dream is not for this world and even Betty's carefully constructed life with her garden and privacy, is untenable. <br /><br />But Gunesekera does not discourage dreaming nor is his message fatalistic. Mr. Amos, a former slave who purchased his own freedom tells Don Lambodar as he despairs his losses, "To imagine is to embrace, not to escape. ...We cannot forget those we love. They shape our lives for ever, by their absence as much as by their presence" (381). Don Lambodar himself sees hope in the development of the younger non-British Mauritians, in particular, a young servant to Aunt Betty. "Don saw in his stride how the future might be improved, if one had the strength to grasp it. He remembered Lucy praising Muru's eager talents. Perhaps this island could become more than one of cane and hurricanes sooner than he imagined. Perhaps, he could yet effect a change and shift the balance in favor of what is right, not wrong, in the world. Do something that both Lucy and Mr. Amos, despite his present dejection, would approve and applaud" (383). <br /><br />Of course, we know in hindsight that Don Lambodar or those like him would, if he succeeded at all, be able to make only very small changes. The spectre of the Western imperialism haunts us all even as the balance of power begins to shift.<br /><br />There are many strengths to Gunesekera's beautifully written novel. The depth and complexity of his characters are perhaps a major strength of <i>Prisoner of Paradise</i>. There is no monolith of colonizer and colonized, and somehow what each character knows about another is different than what another character knows about the same character or what you the reader knows about that character. One character may be blinded by prejudice, another merely by lack of experience, and in other cases it is safer to not know than to know. As with any layered novel, there is much to interpret, and any one interpretation is subject to our own vision and blindness. <br /><br /><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Favorite Books and Book Review</div>Rebecca Stuhrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16995942373049536577noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2077232405902409852.post-70782676100113867642013-03-18T18:20:00.000-06:002013-03-18T18:20:37.682-06:00Greek and Roman Historians: Information and Misinformation<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">This book by Michael Grant, published by Routledge in 1995, is more or less written as a catalog of the short comings of the ancient historians. Grant is not necessarily comparing the ancient historians with our modern day historians, but does touch on the differences here and there. Primarily, today's historians are writing document based history and the ancients, while they had access to some documents and inscriptions were not that concerned (according to Grant) with supporting their histories through documentary evidence. Grant looks closely at 12 historians, although drops the names of at least a dozen more in his writing. Sadly, or perhaps just as a matter of fact, we are dependent on a lot of what we know from these writers of the ancient world. And, much of our historic method probably directly descends from their preferences to write about wars and famous men (and a troublesome woman here and there).<br /><br />I don't know if I find it comforting or not that studying the ancients is really like studying our own modern day selves. Is it terrible that since the dawn of recorded history we really haven't evolved emotionally or psychologically? Or is it comforting?<br /><br />When I was younger I used to think about the crime that I read about during Shakespeare's time or poverty described by Dickens and comfort myself that the world really wasn't less scary then than it was then, just different scary. But now, I'm not so sure. I guess we will always be wise and foolish, caring and selfish, dangerous and protective.<br /><br />But back to the historians.<br /><br />Misinformation and Disinformation: Getting something wrong by accident is misinformation, getting something wrong on purpose is disinformation. In Grant's chronicle of the short comings, this is the last entry: errors. Yes, in the current rendition of the facts of today, I think we can see pretty clearly that we are presented with plenty of both mis- and disinformation. Is it heavy on the side of disinformation? In the future, which type of error will end up as the history of our time? Possibly no history at all, is we madly convert everything to temporarily viable digital files.<br /><br />Selectivity: Sorting through the available information and picking out what best suits the agenda of the ancient historian. This takes me to the reason I read this book in the first place. I came across a reference to it as I was looking into the last twenty years of writing (and honestly, the 20 to 40 years preceding--he (Martin Bernal) gets the credit and notoreity, but he wasn't the first)&nbsp; Martin Bernal's <i>Black Athena</i>. There is nothing about the representation of race in this book, but we know that 19th century and even into the twentieth century, historians, classicists, were keen to literally white wash the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians. They were selective in their sources and biased in their interpretations and I find it shameful and disheartening. Which leads me to Paul Ricoeur and his philosophy of time and history. Very briefly, history changes as time passes. I am not an expert, so I won't dwell on this, but it makes every kind of sense to me. As Michael Grant reiterates, history is written by the victors, by the oligarchy in power. As the victors change, one oligarchy fades into another, the libraries are burnt and rebuilt, the facts and their interpretation shift. We see plenty of that on the campaign trail, in Congress, over the air waves, in our own heads. The more we tell a story, the more we consciously or unconsciously shape it.<br /><br />Imagination: Grant sees Homer as the great model for both history and literature to the Greek and then Roman writers to follow. (And of course we see Odysseus and his travels everywhere in our own modern day literature.) Herodotus, for instance, left a written record, but he read his histories aloud to an audience. He needed to entertain as well as to inform. Some of our ancients were successfully literary; sometimes a good story was more important than strict adherence to the facts. And of course, some of the facts, so to speak, that Herodotus and his fellow historians incorporated into their histories were passed on as part of an oral tradition.<br /><br />Michael Grant writes, "One must not ... be over critical of [the ancient historians' errors], because they are only human and it is human to make mistakes. Besides, their sources are not as good as those which are available to modern scholars."<br /><br />I especially like this sentence, in that it reminds us of our frailties, then and now. But, it is a little harder to excuse our mistakes.<br /><br />Next chapter, does Michael Grant think we should continue to read the ancient historians? I'm pretty sure he will say yes, if for no other reason than that we can see ourselves so clearly both in realizing their mistakes and learning from the past as they describe it. Whether it is completely accurate or not--it is as they believed it to be and it is as they chose to see it. But more on that later. <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Favorite Books and Book Review</div>Rebecca Stuhrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16995942373049536577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2077232405902409852.post-9654833076074723302013-03-04T18:52:00.001-06:002013-03-04T19:10:23.096-06:00Walter Mosely: All I Did Was Shoot My Man<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">This is a relatively new novel (New American Library, 2012) in Mosley's Leonid McGill Mystery series. McGill has a past full of regrets. He is a private investigator with a criminal past, a father that went missing 44 years earlier, three children, a wife, and a former lover. This novel opens as he waits to make amends for one of his more recent wrongs. On request, he framed an innocent woman, implicating her in a massive theft for which she received a heavy sentence. After doing some work to clear her and earn her an early parole, McGill finds that, mysteriously, the crime continues to follow her and its tentacles are wrapping around McGill, his family, and everyone connected to Zella. As he follows the various threads, he attempts to protect his family from the fall out. On the way, McGill's son Twill is learning the art of investigation, his former lover seeks to win him back, and his father surfaces.<br /><br />Mosley's characters, like the names he gives them (Leonid, Socrates, Ptolemy, Tolstoy, for instance), carry a lot of weight. They are strong with their hands and their hearts, brilliant, and worldly wise. They have insight into the characters and motives of those they encounter, and their senses are sharpened by the injustices and hardships they've had to survive.<br /><br />I am not a lover of mysteries, although I know there are good ones out there. I don't want to read a book that I can pretty much follow by reading a sentence here or there on the page--its fat, but there are way more words than necessary. Nothing engages with your brain--ho hum. With Mosley, every word is necessary and every word is a pleasure to read. I'll quote a trio of paragraphs from near the end of the novel:<br /><br />"I'm a twenty-first century New Yorker and therefore have little time to contemplate race. It's not that racism doesn't exist. Lots of people in New York, and elsewhere, hate becaues of color and gender, religion and national origin. It's just that I rarely worry about those things because there's a real world underneath all that nonsense; a world that demands my attention almost every moment of every day.<br /><br />"Racism is a luxury in a world where resources are scarce, where economic competition is an armed sport, in a world where even the atmosphere is plotting against you. In an arena like that racism is more a halftime entertainment, a favorite sitcom when the day is done.<br /><br />"That said, Antoinette was one of the racists. She hated her own people because they didn't see her for what she was. She felt betrayed by black men and then I came along. I brought out a thrill in her heart, and maybe her nether regions. That was all good and well; she was a handsome, brave, and intelligent woman, but I was preoccupied with pain so profound that could barely tell if it was mine alone." <br /><br />Find a copy at your local library or favorite bookstore. </div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Favorite Books and Book Review</div>Rebecca Stuhrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16995942373049536577noreply@blogger.com5